


something or nothing, you and me

by loseyoutoloveme



Category: NCT (Band)
Genre: Alcohol, Alternate Universe - College/University, Alternate Universe - Politics, Angst, Blood, Drugs, Enemies to Friends to Lovers, F/M, Minor Violence, and mentions of - Freeform, if that's not your thing!, oh there's a lot of, that's all you're getting for now hahaHA
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-28
Updated: 2020-07-01
Packaged: 2021-03-02 05:09:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 11
Words: 90,078
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23899516
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/loseyoutoloveme/pseuds/loseyoutoloveme
Summary: You try not to get involved in your dad’s job as much as you can, but it nags at you, no matter what you do. It’s just in your blood, protecting your family.You don’t think you’ll be able to let go of the nasty ads that Jaehyun's dad ran against yours that election cycle.
Relationships: Jung Yoonoh | Jaehyun/Reader
Comments: 141
Kudos: 177





	1. riptide

**Author's Note:**

> lol here we go again!
> 
> i'm intending this to be more multichaptered than my previous two works, hopefully i can churn out around 10 or so shorter chapters but truth be told i dont know how long this is going to go for. enjoy though! id love to hear your comments as the story unfolds xo

You might be the most loyal person on this planet, because when Minnie tells you there’s a new guy you must hate, you don’t even think twice before agreeing.

She can’t stop fidgeting with the skirt of her white halter dress as she surreptitiously tries to eye the huge group of guys across the way. She tilts her head to the side, directing your gaze to her intended target as she mumbles, “There. That’s him.”

You whip your head to the right, you don’t care about being subtle, this is your house and you’ll look at whoever you damn please. Her directions don’t really help, because there’s a dozen and one of Johnny’s obnoxious friends crowded around the drinks table.

“Who? Which one?” Your teeth clang against your glass as you count them off. Taeyong, Doyoung, Taeil, a couple you recognize but don’t know the names of, they’re all annoying and they’re all here. You’d thought Minnie was doing a better job of picking out guys in college, but if she’s talking about one of them you’re going to need to have a serious talk.

“There,” she points a finger over to the guys. “In the blue shirt.”

You look, and immediately groan out loud, “Oh my god, Minnie, you cannot be serious.”

You glance at the boy she’s pointed to, back at her rapidly reddening face, back to him, back to her, then you chug your remaining cocktail in an instant. Minnie’s requested hatred has suddenly become that much easier for you.

You knock your head back against your chair, then gripe, “I let you out of my sight for a couple years and suddenly you’re all brokenhearted about Jaehyun Jung?”

Not once had you thought their paths would cross at Georgetown. Out of all Johnny’s goon squad, he is the least surprising one Minnie could’ve brought up, and you’re kind of disappointed in her for that.

“You know him?” Minnie gasps, pulling you closer to her. “I never mentioned him all those times you called because I never thought you knew him!”

“Unfortunately, yes.”

You don’t make it a habit of letting people know you know Jaehyun Jung. But you and Minnie had only really gotten close during your senior year, and knowing Jaehyun happened, regrettably, well before that.

“His summer house is right down the street. I’ve known him tangentially for a while now,” you mutter, now annoyed as you’re forced to recall the numerous Hampton vacations ruined by that boy. ”The politicians’ circle is small and the offspring of politicians circle is even more so.”

He was the opposite of a summer fling then, truly a summer nuisance, and you’d been so happy when your father let you jet off elsewhere for the past couple years. But now, you’re back for the weekend, Minnie in tow, and so is he.

“Ew,” she wrinkles her nose at your story, and you do the same.

“Ew is right,” you mimic, then glance back over to where he’s standing. “Remind me exactly why we hate him?”

You’ve solemnly swore to hold disdain for any and all men who give Minnie trouble. But she’d gone through so many stories during your first two years of college that you’re not entirely sure how Jaehyun has personally wronged her.

“We hooked up all of spring semester and he didn’t invite me to his fraternity’s formal,” she laments sadly as she wistfully stares across the ballroom. “He ended up taking Mina instead.”

 _Dear Higher Power,_ you think to yourself, _we hate Jaehyun and Mina by proxy, though that is technically against the rules of feminism, that’s within the bounds of friendship. Amen._

“Wassup, girls?” Someone plops onto the arm of the rocking chair you’re sitting in and clinks their glass around yours. You look up to see a familiar non-douchey face, and grin.

“Hey, Marky,” you greet Mark as you lean your head against his thigh.

Minnie blushes. Though Jaehyun is occupying her mind, she apparently also hasn’t let go of her crush on your best friend. “Hi, Mark.”

“What are you guys up to?” He asks, slurping up whatever’s in his cup, and you hope that he’s policing his intake tonight. You’re not at school.

You raise your nose in the air, adopting a haughty tone, “We’re generally slandering Jaehyun Jung and everything he stands for.”

“Jae’s cool, though,” Mark protests innocently, and the casual nickname that comes from your friend is enough to give you pause.

When, oh when, has Mark had time to get acquainted with Jaehyun? You know he goes down to visit Georgetown fairly often, but he’d never brought up the other man in your conversations before. Is your anti-Jaehyun vibe that strong that everyone just avoids the subject of him around you?

“You’re a guy,” you retort, though Mark is the least broiest bro you know. “Of course you’d think that.”

“Yes, but Johnny also thinks so,” Mark tries to reason with you, but you cut him off.

“The world doesn’t revolve around John.”

“Wait, wait,” Minnie hushes the two of you. “Here he comes.”

There’s only one _he_ she can be referring to. You’ve scrolled by pictures on social media here and there, but the last time you’d really seen Jaehyun was when you were scrawny freshmen. Of course, even then, he’d been ridiculously good looking in a lanky, boyish way. But now, - and you’ll never admit this to anyone, not ever - now, it’s a completely different story.

Mark is cutely handsome, and you have to accept that your brother is objectively good looking. His fraternity brothers are all competing levels of attractive, like the best looking men on campus had gravitated to each other and joined NCT all at once. Taeil is comely in a warm way, while Taeyong has the ice elf look about him, and Doyoung is stately and elegant, with dark black hair.

Well, Jaehyun sort of blows them right out of the water.

It’s an admission you have to make under duress, with gritted teeth and a clench in your jaw. But he is… beautiful. You thought you’d been stunned when Chace Crawford came to grounds last year while he was filming a movie, but even he can’t really compare. There’s nothing to compare to golden honey blonde hair, arranged in this masterfully lazy side swept arrangement, to a sky blue silk shirt over a pair of broad shoulders that’s haphazardly unbuttoned, to this sort of commanding aura that surrounds him like a halo.

Every single girl that’s here in your home right now, old to young, Minnie included, is practically salivating over him, following his every move as he walks up to you.But because you have no shame and no girlish reputation to uphold, you don’t try to hide your blatant sneer when he walks up to your little group.

“Hi, Jae, long time no see,” Minnie murmurs, the same blush from before staining her cheeks.

“Hi,” Jaehyun answers, but he pays little to no other attention to her, because his crisp amber stare is now boring itself into you. You really want to flip him off in the middle of this party, but that certainly wouldn’t be following decorum. He needs to turn his lurid stare elsewhere.

“Yo, Jung!” Mark chuckles, the two of them bumping fists in a very friendly way. “Good to see you.”

“Sup, man,” Jaehyun claps your friend on his back, though he still has not removed his gaze from you. “Good to see you, too.”

“Jaehyun, get back here, man!” One of the hooligans across the way calls, and he turns to head back to his friends, giving you one cursory, last glance from over his shoulder.

High school Jaehyun hadn’t been that fucking bizarre, or bold, in his behavior towards you. You could sum it up as low-level tolerance, glazed over with mutual annoyance and infused with deep, unexplained resentment. But you’d honestly take that over whatever the fuck that just was.

“What a dick,” you grumble under your breath.

“Why did you ignore him?!” Minnie practically cries, shoving at your shoulder like she can’t believe what you’ve just done.

“I thought you said we hated him….” you mutter blankly. “And I do….”

“Ugh but he looked so upset, and so cute. I’m going to go talk to him,” she states breezily, like you hadn’t spent the past fifteen minute shit-talking him. She gets up, brushes off the skirt of her dress, fluffs up her curls, and goes sauntering over to where the boys are gathered.

As you watch her try to insert herself into Doyoung and Jaehyun’s conversation, you sigh out loud, “I’m regretting the fact that we decided to come here instead of the Turks house.”

“We’ve gone to the Turks every summer since we were sophomores in high school,” Mark pokes at your cheek as he chuckles. “It’s your brother’s graduation party and he wanted to have it here.”

You glance over to the giant wall filled with golden balloons spelling out _Happy Graduation John!_ Why your brother wanted to have his party here instead of your beach house, you don’t understand. At least in the Turks, it’d just be you and Johnny and Mark and your families, with none of these other stragglers.

“Just you wait, my graduation,” you start to gripe, and then Mark pointedly elbows you. You amend, “ _Our_ graduation party will be even better.”

Minnie and Jaehyun are clearly flirting now, she has one strand of hair caught in her fingers as she twirls it to and fro, so enchanted by whatever he’s saying.

“Why my idiot brother invited him is beyond me,” you’re basically voicing your internal monologue at this point because Mark won’t care. “Ew, the fact that they’re fraternity brothers makes him my relative by proxy or something.”

Mark laughs out loud at the expression of disgust on your face, “That’s not how it works.”

“You’re not in a frat, you’re not the authority on this subject.”

“I am in a social club, thank you very much.”

“A decision I’ll never understand,” you roll your eyes as you think of your funny friend amongst the elite of Harvard’s pretentious social organizations. The ice in Mark’s glass rattles around loudly and you warn him in a low voice, “Chug that drink before your dad sees you, or worse, mine. I’ll get you a different cup so you don’t look that obvious.”

Even though you both partied on campus, and have been drinking together for years, to your dad and his friends, you were still the prim and proper underaged students that you were supposed to be. You’d made a big show of pouring yourself seltzer when you first arrived at the party, only subtly pouring in the vodka when no adults were looking.

“By the way, where’s Channie?”

You haven’t seen Haechan here yet tonight, as joined to the hip to Mark as he is. If all the NCT boys are here, surely he would’ve come up as well. He’s basically the whole reason Mark goes down to Georgetown so often.

Mark frowns. “His internship in San Francisco started last week and he wasn’t able to fly back.”

“Ugh, I’m sorry,” you ruffle his hair, hoping to cheer him up from missing his other best friend. “I’ll put a double shot in for you.”

That does the trick, earning you a patented Mark Lee Cheeky Grin and his famed Gru impression. “Thanks, baby gorl, you’re the best!”

There are perks to being the de facto hostess of this party, because you don’t have to go to the public set up to retrieve a new cup for Mark. You bypass it for the kitchen, the mostly empty room providing you with a brief respite from the bustling animosity of the gathering outside. You walk by someone searching through your freezer and retrieve from the shelves an opaque glass for Mark, its dark coloring sufficient enough to disguise his whiskey.

You turn to leave just as the ice tray slips out of the fingers of the person by the freezer. You have enough foresight to stick your hand out and catch it before the ice shatters everywhere, and you’re about to give this stranger a piece of your mind for going rummaging in your kitchen, when you realize who it is.

“I had that,” Jaehyun begins to explain, then he sees that it’s you who’s caught the ice tray.

“Sure, cocky bastard,” you spit.

His eyebrow quirks, inviting the fight as he immediately snarls back, “I did, frigid witch.”

Suddenly, you’re twelve again and getting lectured by your father for using the word _bastard_ , and you only said it because Jaehyun called you a frigid witch first! It wasn’t until high school that you had added _cocky_ in, because he had deserved that label even then.

You purse your lips at his propriety. “We’re not kids anymore, you can call me frigid bitch. You won’t go to hell for cursing, even if your stepmother thinks so.”

You’re sure the ever fashionable and pious Stephanie Jung is here in your house somewhere, but she’s not around to catch her stepson cursing right now. He can’t possibly want you to think he still doesn’t curse. Every college student has a sailor mouth, yourself included.

Jaehyun’s eyes narrow at you and he snaps at you with a cutting jibe, “I’m sure the cold weather of Boston has only added to your legend.”

You don’t even let his remark mar at you, only giving it back as good as you got, “I wonder if there’s a single woman in D.C. who didn’t take their turn letting you fail to live up to your nickname.”

You’re trying to stand up for Minnie, to expose the womanizing ways you’re sure he partakes in, but you’ve absolutely chosen the wrong path of attack. You know you have, because instead of him spitting back some vitriol, a smug smile dances a bachata across his face.

“Are you trying to find out? Those New England boys not doing enough?”

You literally cannot believe he’s acting like this, cannot believe your body is having the audacity to react in this way, to allow the slightest lick of heat to curl up the back of your neck.

You cross your arms in front of you, and scoff, “I’m seriously appalled you’re here.”

His eyebrow lifts. “Are you that surprised to see me?”

“Aha!” Johnny bursts into the kitchen, glass of bourbon in his hand. “My favorite NCT brother!” 

“Hey, pres. Congratulations, again,” Jaehyun strains to get the words out in the midst of Johnny’s tight hug. “Thanks for the invite.”

This disloyal prick.

“Of course,” Johnny presses the side of his face into Jaehyun’s and your brother is already well on his way to drunk. “There’s no other person I’d want to celebrate my time in college with.”

“You,” you snarl under your breath, feeling like chopped liver as you stand there. “You invited him.”

Both of the men open their mouths in mocking os, and Johnny whines, “He’s my brother!”

“I’m your real sister!” You exclaim, about to start off another round of arguing, but your father’s booming voice silences you all.

“Attention!”

That tells you exactly what you need to do, and so you shove the ice tray back into the freezer with a snarling frown towards Jaehyun, who backs off sheepishly with his hands raised. You grab Johnny’s hand and tug him back into the ballroom, snagging two glasses of champagne (the only acceptable alcohol for you tonight), and position him by your father’s right side.

You squeeze your dad’s shoulder, then make your way to stand by his left.

This is something you’re used to, what seems like a thousand and one gazes on you, but it’s the first time you’ve had an active corner of the room to avoid. But that’s easy, because you can focus on Mark grinning at you from beside his dad, instead of over to the dangerous area you’ve just emerged from.

“Thank you, everyone, for being here tonight, I — and my family — have a lot to be grateful for,” your father warmly addresses the crowd. He puts his arm around Johnny’s shoulder and you lean yourself into his side. “John has graduated from Georgetown with honors, and y/n has just finished up her second year at Harvard. It means so much for me to have you all here celebrating with us. I don’t want to bore you all with a puffed up speech, so all I will end with is enjoy my champagne! Cheers!”

The assembled crowd echoes with a _Cheers!_ of their own and the symphony of glasses clanking rings into your ears. As Mr. Lee makes his way over to congratulate your dad, Johnny slips his hand into yours, whispering quietly, “I wish mom could be here.”

You let out a sigh, from the depths of your sun-dried heart, and reply, “Yeah. Me too.”

The sunflower of your mom’s presence would be the cherry to top off this night.

“Governor Suh.”

You and Johnny both turn to where someone has approached your father, and your eyes narrow at the sight of Jeffrey Jung, Sr. — Boston’s former congressman, but more notably, Jaehyun’s father.

You will never forget the Election Day debacle from five years ago, Jaehyun and his father’s stunned faces as your dad was declared the new governor of Massachusetts. You suppose you’ve also pinpointed the moment the relationship was soured forever. That was also the last time you’d seen the eldest Jung in person.

But your father, ever the consummate gentleman, greets him back politely, “Congressman Jung.”

Though you suppose the _congressman_ moniker can now be dropped, because Jaehyun’s father has been retired from the world of politics since his failed campaign. Perhaps for the betterment of the state.

“Congratulations on graduating, John,” the older man addresses your brother, the wrinkles by his eyes creasing in the same way his son’s do. “I know Jaehyun enjoyed having you on campus. Made his move there a bit easier, especially with the way you welcomed him as a Nu brother like you did.”

Johnny accepts the greetings with practiced poise, “Thank you. And yeah, Jae’s great, it’s been really awesome to have him in NCT.”

Jaehyun’s father turns his attention to you next, and his voice is warm then, “Y/n, so glad to hear you’re flourishing at Harvard. I always knew your dad had to have a legacy.”

You catch Johnny’s subtle flinch at the comment. Though your father let you freely choose which universities you wanted to go to, you knew he was always holding out hope that one of you would follow in his Crimson footsteps. When Johnny had only gotten into Georgetown, that burden had fallen on you. You’d followed through for your family like you always did, and always will, by getting in on an early application. You purposefully never bring it up in this manner though, as to not upset Johnny, and already feel annoyed at the congressman for doing so.

But you’re still a member of this family in all ways, you can’t give Mr. Jung the cold shoulder like you want to.

You just smile demurely and reply, “Thank you, sir.”

He starts to engage your father in some meaningless conversation you couldn’t give a shit about, giving you and Johnny the perfect avenue to slip away from the mingling.

“Narc,” you mutter under your breath at the older man’s turned back.

Johnny coughs over the sip of champagne he’s just taken, “D-did you just call Congressman Jung a narc?”

“Isn’t it like public knowledge how he sold out all those kids at BC to the feds for that weed scandal all those years ago?” You can definitely picture the scathing headline, probably the exact nail in the coffin that had lost him that election. Ironic, considering his own son joined a fraternity that loved to partake in that very habit.

“That’s not being a narc, that was doing the right thing,” Johnny says sternly. “I’m pretty sure they had a shit ton of weed. ”

You’ll never understand how uptight he is about things like this sometimes, even your dad had sided with you. And you know for certain that the NCT brothers love a good dabble in marijuana. “Everyone smokes weed in college, John. You’re saying you didn’t?”

Johnny shakes his head. “No, I’m not saying that.”

“He’s just another buttoned up example of how politics in this country have gone down the toilet.”

“Dad’s a politician,” Johnny points out, and you roll your eyes.

“He’s a politician we like, though.”

“Yeah, yeah. You’re too loyal,” Johnny tugs at your earlobe, and you yelp. “Don’t get too riled up over the Jungs tonight, okay? It’s my night.”

Ugh, this is one of your biggest flaws, how guarded you get and how things like this can take over your attitude in a second. You try not to get involved in your dad’s job as much as you can, but it nags at you, no matter what you do. It’s just in your blood, protecting your family. You don’t think you’ll be able to let go of the ads that Jaehyun's dad ran against yours that election cycle, though you realize that’s just part of the game.

But tonight is meant to be a lighthearted party, and you owe Johnny and his hard work at Georgetown as much.

“Right, I’m sorry.”

“Don’t worry about it, corn pop. I’m going to go find Yong and the boys.” He gives you one more tug on the ear, calling you by your secret childhood nickname to let you know he isn’t actually upset. Once you smile back fondly, he disappears into the crowd, leaving you in the middle of the empty hallway.

You glance at yourself in the full length mirror that’s pinned up on the opposite wall. This is an odd moment for you, self-reflecting in the middle of the ruckus filling up the house. There’s nothing wrong with your outward appearance, your white dress is still immaculately flowing around your figure, heels still high, makeup still primed.

But something about you feels like it’s just a tad bit off, you don’t know if it’s because you’ve had a plethora of weird interactions tonight, or if it’s maybe because your hand has been a bit heavy at pouring the vodka in your cup.

Ah, you know why. It’s because Jaehyun is also visible in the mirror’s reflection.

He’s not right next to you, he’s still far enough away that you won’t make a rude comment, but he’s also close enough for you to hear the way he says, “You didn’t answer my question earlier.”

You know exactly what question he’s referencing, but you’re just going to feign ignorance and smooth out a tendril of hair behind your ear. He takes that opportunity to get up close and personal, walking up to where you’re standing by the mirror and allowing his shoulder to brush yours so, so casually. This is a painting straight out of the era of romanticism, usually muted colors of your clothes shining crisply in the hall light, the tapestry behind you lush as a background. The rays of straining tautness clearly radiate out between the two of you as you each stare at the other in the reflection.

You can’t watch the way his pink lips repeat,“Are those New England boys not doing enough for you?”

“You are a New England boy,” you answer him blandly, turning away from the mirror so you can’t contemplate how aesthetically pleasing you both are now that you’re older. “Just because you go to a school that’s technically in the south doesn’t mean you can pretend otherwise.”

Jaehyun has a response for everything, devilishly smooth in a way that he wasn’t before, “And just because you keep ignoring me doesn’t mean I’m going to drop the topic.”

“We have not seen each other since high school, what business is it of yours?” You try your best to come off as bored, but he’s already affecting you in this way. You love Minnie, but you cannot be like her tonight.

“It’s my business because I enjoy how much asking riles you up.”

He states it plainly, no affectations or strings, but it’s way too much for seeing him for the first time in years. Way too much paired with the way that his arm continues to hover by yours. The tension had never detonated between the two of you like this.

“Y/n, is that you? Oh it’s so good to finally see you,” you’re saved, blessedly, by the appearance of Jaehyun’s stepmother in the hallway.

She’s still as youthful as ever, dolled up in a Gucci dress that’s almost as short as yours, signature sparkling gold cross necklace around her neck. She’d always been so kind to you before, even let you borrow a designer purse of hers for one of your first Hampton charity auctions. Even now, you’re holding onto a small soft spot for the ditzy matriarch of their family.

“Mrs. Jung,” you accept her hug and air kiss. “It’s lovely to see you.”

She waves her hands in the air as she giggles, “Mrs. Jung, you are so funny. You’re old enough to call me Stephanie now.”

“Get lost, Stephanie,” Jaehyun callously bites out, and though he’s somehow grown up into this lewdly flirtatious young man, he still holds the same disdain for his stepmother that he always has.

Though you kind of understand that, this gives you leverage.

“Don’t be rude,” you chide him primly, then take Stephanie’s hand with yours. “Thanks for coming tonight. I love your dress.”

“I can’t believe it’s been so long since we’ve seen you both,” she’s pleased as punch to chirp away happily to you, even with Jaehyun’s frosty glare into her back. “It’s really no surprise that you’re flourishing at Harvard.”

She gives you the same compliment her husband had earlier, but it sounds much more sincere coming from her.

“Thank you. I love it there.”

“Are there any Harvard boys who will have to deal with meeting your father?” She asks slyly, and this is just her, wanting to be young again and get all the gossip.

“Frigid bitch,” Jaehyun coughs under his breath, and your teeth grind. He really is such a dick. At least this time he has the balls to use the proper swear word.

Stephanie doesn’t catch his subtle insult, “What did you say, Jaehyun?”

If he’s trying to play this lowball game, he has no idea what’s coming for him, the exact way you can curse him out in an extravagantly public manner. There’s a reason why you’re the president of your speech and debate club, you can go toe to toe with the fiercest of anyone and come out on top.

“Y/n, can you come here so we can take a picture?” Your father interrupts, then catches a glimpse of Stephanie out in the hallway with you. He inclines his head towards her, “Oh. Hello.”

She smiles prettily, bowing her head back in return, “Hello, Governor.”

“I’ll be right there, papa,” you call back at him, then you squeeze the other woman’s hand one more time. “It was really nice to see you, Stephanie.”

“You too, y/n! Hopefully we can all meet up in Boston sometime,” she offers, and you nod at her though you have no intention of taking up her offer.

As you leave, you dip your voice so low that only Jaehyun can hear.But you definitely make sure to put enough emphasis on how you’ve properly modified his nickname to fit the new him.

“Cocky fucker.”

Then, you proceed to avoid him for the rest of the party. It’s way easier than you expect, because everyone and their mom seems to want to talk to you. There’s something to be said about how your flirting with the other young men there somehow always draws Jaehyun’s attention.

Your point proven, you’re casually watching him watch you from across the room when someone calls your name, “Y/n!”

You whirl around to see Mr. Lee’s right hand man in front of you. “Henry? I didn’t realize you would be here.”

You haven’t been around to S&L in some time, but it’s nice to see that Henry is still working with your father and Mark’s dad. He’d been involved in your father’s business affairs since his first campaign for governor. You’d always found him handsome, even if he was fifteen years or so older than you, and now is no exception, in his embroidered Hawaiian beach shirt and white jeans.

“I came here to celebrate your brother, but I suppose it’s you that should be celebrated,” he compliments you coolly, raising his glass to you in a salute. “College has done you well.”

That’s new. You suppose Henry feels comfortable enough to comment on your appearance now that you’re a college woman and not just his boss’s high school aged daughter. Though you’ll never seriously contemplate going after him, let alone crushing on him, you can’t lie and say it doesn’t make you feel flattered as hell. He’s probably the second most handsome man in this room, anyways.

You glance around, hoping that your dad isn’t close enough to hear his employee bantering with you, and your eyes land right on Jaehyun. He’s bent over the pool table, contemplating a move with his cue, but you pick up the exact way he’s observing you in his periphery, trying to figure out who exactly you’re talking to.

You want to test your observation out, so you place a casual hand on Henry’s forearm, and let out a fake, affected giggle, “Oh, you’re too kind.”

There’s no reason for Jaehyun’s jaw to visibly grind, as if on cue, but it does, and that brings you a kind of satisfaction you’re not sure how to name.

Feels good, though.

—

“Remind me again why we have to leave tonight?” Minnie asks, just as you turn yourself over on your towel.

You normally wouldn’t take the liberty of tanning, but it’s in the sixties and rainy in Boston and you have to take advantage of the little sun that you can get in your last few hours here. And fuck it, you look good in your bikini.

“I mean, you can stay here,” you offer. “But I have to go back.”

“You can’t leave me here alone!”

You glance over to where the guys are tossing around a football in the sand and you mutter into the ocean wind, “I’d thought you want to stay and hang with Jaehyun, or whatever.”

"No,” she bites out. “We definitely hate him.”

You turn your head to look at her, to really register her deep frown and disapproving glare at the boy, and can’t help but feel so confused at everything that’s going on. She’d hated him at the beginning of the party yesterday, had ended up in the throes of flirting by the champagne toast, and then he’d decided to spend the rest of the evening pushing at your very irritable buttons.

“Okay, you’re going to have to decide one way or another, because you spent half the night flirting with him yesterday,” you don’t miss the way the blush starts to color at her cheeks despite her mouth saying otherwise.

In the game, Jaehyun makes this spectacularly leaping catch of the football and whips off his white cotton shirt in celebration. The flush only deepens on Minnie’s face as your nose wrinkles in annoyance at his sculpted frame.

But you’re proud of her when she says, “Ugh, I take it back, he left the party with Krystal yesterday.”

That’s a tendril of silky disappointment that you didn’t expect to feel just then. It’s probably expected, for Jaehyun to leave all social events with a beautiful new woman on his arm. But leaving your house with the mayor of the Hamptons’ daughter? That, now that is prickly and annoying. Luckily, Krystal hadn’t shown up with him at the beach this morning.

“He’s so fucking weird,” you grumble, his new persona still an enigma to you. “He kept trying to find out if I’ve hooked up with anyone at Harvard.”

“That is weird,” Minnie hums in agreement. “But he knows everything about everyone at Georgetown, so I don’t think it’s that surprising he’s being nosy about you.”

“Have you said anything to him?”

“You’ve never come up.”

“Good. Keep it that way.” There’s no reason why Jaehyun should know any personal business about you.

“I still don’t understand why you hate him so much.” You give her a pointed look and she quickly amends her statement to include, “I mean beyond the girl code hate that I am definitely sticking to.”

“Feel lucky that your family doesn’t have insane political rivals.” That’s another ribbon of sadness to tie in with the disappointment. It might’ve been nice to have a friend in this crazy world, just one. “I just, I don’t want to get into all of it. I’m better off leaving him as a person that just exists in my periphery.”

“Leaving who as what?” Mark goes skidding into the towel you’ve laid out for him, snatching the sunscreen from your hand as he eats his sandwich.

“Nothing. Don’t worry about it,” you don’t want this conversation to go on any further. You wipe a dab of sunscreen off his nose and ask, “You still coming back with us tonight?”

Both of you start your senior-level political science summer class tomorrow, but you’re not sure if he’s inclined to play hooky with the friends he doesn’t see that often.

“Yeah,” Mark nods. “Is it weird to say I miss Boston?”

You think of the little townhouse on the river you’ll be moving to in the fall and wish that you were there right now. “No. I miss it, too. Are you going to go out to SF this summer, then?”

“Yup, I’m planning on going for Fourth of July, since you’re going to Miami that weekend,” he shows you the scheduled trip on his phone, complete with a picture of him and Haechan in front of the Washington Monument.

“Ugh, being in California with you two honestly sounds better than doing stuff for PR with the governors’ association.”

“At least you guys have fun summers planned,” Minnie mumbles. “I’m stuck at home with my parents in Newton because my internship with Prada's PR team fell through at the last minute.”

You throw your arm around her despondent figure and you know you have the perfect remedy for her summertime blues. “Don’t worry, I’ll bring you to all the summer ragers. I do happen to know some nice Harvard guys.”

“Hey, Lee!” Johnny calls over to where you’re sitting. “We need you for three on three!”

Mark sticks his bandaged leg in the air, an unfortunate incident he’d suffered in his last club lacrosse game of the year. “I can’t! Ankle, remember?”

“Y’all wanna forfeit?” Jaehyun laughs, crossing his arms over his chest in a gross display of his bulky arms. He needs to be put into place.

“No, ask my sister. Ask her,” you can read Johnny’s lips even from your spot by the umbrella. “I swear to god, just ask her.”

Taeyong looks at him skeptically, but Johnny only nods emphatically.Taeyong then comes jogging over and smiles quite sweetly at you as he kneels in the sand and asks, “Y/n, want to be our third?”

You put the sunglasses over your eyes. “Not particularly.”

“We’re betting this round, I’m sure John will be fine if you pick our bet.”

You look back over at where Jaehyun’s laughing, head thrown back with abandon as Doyoung and Taeil trash talk with him, and your eyes narrow.

“Alright, fine.”

“This will be funny,” Mark guffaws, knowing what’s likely about to happen. “Let me get Chan on the phone.”

He scoots over to get a better view of the match, and you can hear Haechan’s scream over Facetime as you put on a t-shirt on top of your purple swimsuit, and go up to the small crowd of guys.

You clap your hands together. “Alright, who am I betting against?”

“Me,” Jaehyun answers. Perfect.

“You’re good with anything that I want, you sure?” You look to Taeyong and your brother, and they both shrug, telling you to go ahead.

Jaehyun smirks, then lays the bet right on you, “If we win, you have to tell me about the boys at Harvard.” What is his fucking fascination with your personal life, god damn?!

You glance back at your friend, too far away to be anything but oblivious to your conversation, but you’re going to do the dirty work for her. You don’t hesitate for a second before snapping back, “And if we win, you have to apologize to Minnie.”

“Apologize for what?” He protests, and you wonder if he’s being willfully ignorant or just incredibly not self aware.

“You want me to say it out loud in front of your bros?” You look around at all of the other guys, who are solidly intrigued with this back and forth. Jaehyun doesn’t respond, so you let it loose, “For being a slimy fucking user who thinks he can sleep with anyone.”

 _OHHH_ , Doyoung and Taeil cry in unison, like what you’ve said is the most hilarious thing ever, and though Jaehyun’s lips purse for a second, he doesn’t seem that fazed by you.

“If that’s what you think I am, that’s what I am,” he shrugs, then the three of them huddle up to discuss strategy.

“The old classic?” Johnny inquires, as soon as the three of you have done the same.

You wink at him. “You know it.”

Taeyong looks back and forth between you two, totally confused as to what you’re discussing, “What are you guys planning?”

“Don’t worry about it, just block for us,” Johnny orders him. “Block all three of them if you need to.”

Taeyong nods, as Taeil reminds you all,“Remember, whoever crosses the end zone first wins.”

Oh, these poor fools. This game is already over.

The other guys start with the ball first, by virtue of some rule you don’t know, and then they’re off. Doyoung pitches the ball to Taeil, who easily sidesteps Taeyong’s advances and makes it halfway down the marked pitch of sand. You’re covering Jaehyun, getting incredibly into his personal space as he tries to push you away from him, not even having enough time to really think about just how close you are to his bare torso.

Johnny manages to catch Taeil around the waist, but before the other guy can go down, he tosses the ball in your direction. Jaehyun shoves you out of the way particularly hard, you stumble in the sand, and that gives him enough time to reach out and catch the ball, taking off towards where they’ve outlined the makeshift end zone.

You can’t let him end the game just like this, so you give chase after him, quickly catching up and wrestling with him for the football. He tries to keep it tucked away from your grasp, holding his long arm out so you can’t bear hug him, but you reach around his other side and wildly swing your fist. You do it once, twice, and finally your hand comes into contact with the leather.

“Loose ball!” Johnny screams, and you dive for it without even really seeing the flash of brown.

Jaehyun’s weight is above you as he scrambles for the ball as well, Johnny’s there and Taeil too and finally you hear Taeyong’s triumphant scream,

“I got it!”

You smack Jaehyun out of your way, staggering to your feet to catch Taeyong tossing the ball to Johnny. This is just what the two of you planned, the exact mirror of all those fall days you played football in the backyard. After all, without a brother, how else was Johnny supposed to practice for high school tryouts?

“1287 special!” Johnny yells as he dodges a charging Doyoung, and you know just what to do.

You sprint as fast as you can down the sand, you have to make sure you’re within range of the end zone before you can afford to turn your head back. Taeyong literally throws himself in front of Taeil so he can’t touch you, and you have only a few more steps to go before you’re by the driftwood mark-off. You look back just as Johnny throws a perfect, tight spiral, and you step to leap past Jaehyun, who’s appeared out of nowhere. You time it exactly right, so his head isn’t turned quite yet, and that allows you to catch the ball neatly in your arms and land with a tumble in the end zone.

You straighten up with your arms held above you in victory, and Jaehyun is standing in front of you with his mouth wide open.

“Go y/n!” Minnie screams, waving her fist in the air.

“Yaaaaaaaaas!” Mark hollers in unison with Haechan on the phone.

“It’s already over?” Doyoung huffs, putting his hands on his knees as he and Taeil pant.

Johnny runs over, smacking his hand into yours so you can do the old handshake that’s like second nature to you.

“Don’t have to be shady,” Johnny bellows, and you toss him the football so he can spike it. You finish the chant with him, “Bow down to Gronk and Brady!”

“Your sister is good at football,” Taeyong marvels as he slaps your brother’s hand in a high five.

Johnny tugs at your ear before he pulls you into a hug and brags, “My sister’s good at everything.”

“How did that even happen,” Jaehyun whispers under his breath, like he can’t believe you actually beat him.

“It helps to only have a brother,” you breeze, then you stick out your hand to him. “Pay up, cocky fucker.”

Though his face doesn’t do anything noticeable, you do see the way his fist clenches at his side, the pearl bracelet there glittering as it catches the sun. Jaehyun stalks past you, beelining right to where Minnie is clapping for you on her towel, and you jog to catch up so you won’t miss this.

“Minnie, I’m very sorry for what I did and how I acted towards you,” he sounds contrite as he apologizes, you suppose, but you doubt that he even really cares. Especially with the way he fixes you with a defiant gaze as soon as he’s done saying it.

“Oh,” Minnie goes pink in surprise as Mark giggles beside her. “That’s okay, Jae.”

She looks over to you, and you raise your eyebrows like _you’re welcome_. Hopefully that clears the air between the two of them for good and Minnie can peacefully move on. If she’s moved on, there’s no reason for Jaehyun to make a reappearance in your life moving forward.

“Last one to the ocean is a pussy!” Johnny announces, and takes off right to the water sin a crazed run.

Mark pulls Minnie up from the towel, the two of them shrieking in delight as they take off after your brother and his friends, leaving you and Jaehyun by the towels.

“Satisfied, frigid bitch?” Jaehyun gripes, rubbing at the back of his head with his head, sending his golden hair into a cascade of frenzy.

You put your hands on your hips, able to call him out now that you’re alone, “Did you mean it?”

“Seagull,” he points out blandly, and you duck to your side with a yelp to avoid the diving bird. You cower behind Jaehyun as the bird roots through the remnants of Mark’s sandwich, pulls out a tomato, and flies away.

You stand back up, a little embarrassed at your reaction, and mutter, “Thanks.”

“Are you coming out with us tonight?” Jaehyun changes the subject, though you’re not that easily fooled, you’ll let him have this one.

You shake your head. “Absolutely not.”

“Itching to get away that badly?”

“Mark and I are driving back to Boston, thank you very much.” You grab your towel to wipe some of the sand off of your legs, then curtly continue, “only came down for the weekend. Can’t really stand this place, even more than you.”

Now that you’ve had your time to form an adult opinion about the place, you really don’t want to come back to the Hamptons. It’s too classist, too elitist, and you never really feel like you have a good enough time here. Thus, that makes it an apt comparison to Jaehyun, who you really don’t feel like you want to spend any more time with.

You think you’re just continuing the ribbing that’s been going on for the past couple days, and expect him to snap at you in return, and instead his voice goes a little quiet, “What is your problem with me?”

Your comment hadn’t been particularly heinous, but his amber eyes are watercolored in hurt, like you’d stabbed deep at him with it. That only serves to make you madder.

“What is my problem with you, what is your problem with me?! I’ve never done anything to you.”

His fist is clenched again as he retorts, “You definitely have.”

“Oh yeah, like what?” You challenge him, wanting to know just exactly what you’ve done to earn his ire.

He hesitates for a second, clearly searching for something he can’t find, and all he can muster is, “Like, like being a Suh.”

His dig at your family name is way too far. Being a Suh is your pride and joy, it’s the name you share with your brother and father, it’s what you’ll have on your drivers license for the rest of your life. Your husband will just have to deal with the fact that you won’t change your name.

“Johnny’s a Suh too and you have no problem with him,” you bite back icily.

Jaehyun shakes his head, “I just, I just can’t bring myself to care about someone who holds values that are so fundamentally different to mine.”

You know that your fathers have differing political platforms, but it’s not like you’re Ivanka Trump or something. You don’t think your values are wildly out of touch.

“So you can’t care about me, but you can care about who I’m fucking at school, right?” You practically spit, now that he has incensed your anger to this degree.

Jaehyun actually has the sense to look embarrassed then, the crude way you’ve framed his questioning making it more obvious to him that he’s really been bothering you.

You sigh deeply, “And you wonder why I have a problem with you. You always treated me poorly, excluded me from family time with my sibling just because I was a girl. And I get that, we were kids then. But now? We haven’t seen each other in years, yet you don’t see me getting up in your business, acting really shitty like you’ve been to me both days this weekend? I don’t do those things to you. I don’t.”

You’d only acted towards him with perfunctory disdain out of your loyalty to Minnie, and had been perfectly prepared to just ignore him all night without trading any of the barbs you did. Without her backstory, you would’ve even treated him with the vapid politeness you’d reserved for his father. You may have even ventured to say that your annoyance with him the previous night may have been a little irrational and misguided.

But he’s just blown you completely away with his callousness.

You’re unleashing it all now, how you’d hated the way he would keep Johnny away from you, how he’d look down upon you whenever you happened to cross paths in the city, how he and his family bashed yours during the election.

“You were the one who called me cocky bastard first last night,” he points out, like you’ve somehow caused all of this. “You had no idea whether or not I was going to be different.”

You bite your teeth as you apologize, though you don’t feel particularly sorry, “I’m sorry for that, really. But it’s obvious you’ve earned your nickname and I haven’t done a thing to earn mine.”

“You’re being hypocr—,” he starts, but there’s no stopping you now.

“So, just like you can’t stand that I’m a Suh, I cannot tolerate the fact that you’re a Jung. Sometimes I feel bad for Stephanie. Really, I do.”

This is a targeted attack, one that’s designed to hurt him as much as he’s hurt you, and you can tell that it does by the way that the crinkles by his eyes flash in anxiety, the way he fidgets with the waist of his swim trunks when he can’t find something to do with his hands. If he’s going to target your identity, you’re going to do the same, because he’s the one person you hope you’ll never be like.

So, yes, the relationship between the two of you had been practically nonexistent before this moment for a tsunami of reasons, but it’s only taken these two days to completely torpedo it.

You stare down Jaehyun Jung, the man you’re sure you will never, ever be worthy of you or your time in any way, and you speak the harsh truth,

“I doubt I’ll come back to the Hamptons, which is great, because I keep running into you here and you always seem to ruin it for me. But you ever see me in Boston, don’t even dare to do anything but look. That’s all you’ll be able to get from me ever again.”

The roar of the ocean waves crashing is your fanfare to exit, leaving behind a stunned and silent Jaehyun.

Later, Mark brings it up on the ferry back to Connecticut.

He must see the tense way you grip the steering wheel of your car even though you’re not driving. “You seem off.”

You let out a breath you didn’t realize you were holding, “That, that just wasn’t my idea of a fun weekend.”

“Want to talk about why you left the beach early?” He starts tentatively, finally asking the question that had been written all over his face when he came back to the house after you’d run inside.

“Mark…”

“Are you annoyed that Minnie decided to stay behind?”

“No,” you answer shortly.

“It seems like it,” Mark indicates, and he’s always been the one who knows you the best, even more than Johnny does.

You’re not sure how you’re going to answer him without bringing up everything that’s happened, everything that you don’t want to think about again. This has hurt you more than you want to admit. All those conversations and arguments and old visitors cut open a bunch of unhealed wounds. You know that Jaehyun isn’t a bad kid, not really, but it’s hard for you not to see him as one.

But like you said, Mark knows you, and you know exactly who he’s talking about when he says softly, “Okay, listen, I understand that there’s a lot of bad blood there, and rightfully so. Don’t think I’m taking his side, because I’ll always be on yours. But he’s not his father, just like you’re not yours.”

“I can only hope to be like my father,” you proclaim, thinking of all the good your father’s done the state, how accomplished and wonderful he is, how little you wanted to be just like him and current you still does, too.

Mark puts his hand over yours on the steering wheel. “You’re going to be so much more than him, I know it. But do you understand what I’m saying?”

He’s chastising you gently, for putting Jeffrey Sr.’s sins on Jaehyun, for not getting to know him as the adult he is now. For jumping to conclusions too quickly, for being too defensive. And you know you’ve somewhat been in the wrong. Now that you’re here, without the chaos surrounding you, you can objectively look at the situation and understand that.

“Yes, yes, Mark, I get it. It’s just so hard to dissociate him from his family and everything they mean. It’s easier to pretend he doesn’t exist.”

“And I respect that. You won’t hear about him from me when I go down to Georgetown this year,” he offers, and you’re grateful to him for that because you know Mark will definitely be spending time with Jaehyun this year.

However, his sentence trails off a bit too lightly, and you look over at him. “I’m getting a feeling that there’s a _but_ in there.”

“But,” Mark parrots out instantly. “He’s one of my friends, and he’s one of your brother’s closest ones, too. It might help you some day to also become friends with him.”

You don’t think that you’ll ever get there after the way you shouted at him today, nor do you really want to. You can’t picture shooting the shit with him, or going on a road trip together like you and Mark do, or even just sitting with him in comfortable silence. But he’s right, your life would be multitudes less awkward if you could come to at least tolerate Jaehyun.

“I’ll think about it,” you relent darkly.

“Baby gorl……” Mark distorts his voice into his Gru impression, pleading with you, and you laugh, finally feeling a little bit okay about it all.

“I promise, I promise. I’ll think about not hating him this year.”

“Right. But summer is just starting, so you have time,” Mark teases, and then he turns up the volume on the radio so he can rap along to Drake.

You’re taking a shitload of hard classes next year, you’re going to be looking for jobs and contemplating your career and trying to maintain your social standing on campus. But you suppose, for Mark and for Johnny, you can find one or two days to contemplate being okay with Jaehyun’s presence in your life.

You have a feeling you won’t be able to keep him completely out of it, anyways.

**tbc.**


	2. wishful

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> You don’t hate Jaehyun anymore, and you don’t yet like him, but you honestly don’t know how you’re supposed to feel about him right now.

You’re standing outside of Cambridge Secondary School, aimlessly toeing at the crack in the sidewalk as you wait for the company driver to pick you up, when a set of business shoes come into your line of sight.

You look up to see who’s joined you, and nearly topple into the street.

What the hell is Jaehyun Jung doing here?

You’re almost half convinced your eyes are playing tricks on you, but it’s definitely him. He’s got his honey blonde hair gelled back and he’s wearing glasses and a pinstriped grey suit. But the name tag he’s wearing clearly says Jeffrey Jung, Jr., guest from J4 Software, and you recognize the pearl bracelet he’s wearing. He gapes at you in silence, mouth all the way open just like yours is, the two of you beyond surprised to be caught at the same place at the same time.

“Jaehyun,” you greet him politely, as you still are well within working hours and he is a professional colleague in this circumstance.

How is it possible that he’s gotten even better looking than he had been at your Hamptons house last year? You don’t know how you’ve made it through an entire school year without seeing a picture of him to inform you of this fact, but perhaps you would’ve liked to know. You would’ve liked to know about his sparkly diamond earring, at least, to prepare yourself for that little vision.

“Oh? We’re speaking to each other?” Jaehyun questions after he purses his lips, though you can catch the smile fighting to peek through. “If I recall correctly, you said all I could do if I ran into you in Boston is look at you.”

“Hilarious,” you deadpan, remembering exactly what you said during that fight. Admittedly stupid words.

“You’d know that I’m funny if you’d tried to get to know me last summer,” he gripes, not totally mad, and you know that Johnny’s always laughing around him so he must actually be funny.

You bypass the sterile but pleasant exchange to admit, “Mark asked me to contemplate not hating you this year, and I suppose it took me the full three hundred sixty five days to realize that I, in fact, do not actually hate you.”

To be honest, you’d sort of settled on and accepted that fact the moment you got back to Boston from the Hamptons. Mark had seriously changed your mindset that quickly and you’d recognized that for your own personal development, you’d need to be more magnanimous in your perception of others. But school and life and everything else got in the way, so much so that this is truly the first time you’ve thought about Jaehyun since last summer.

Jaehyun smiles, dimpled and intoxicating, god damn it. “Wow, shocking admission from Princess Suh herself.”

“I am sorry about that,” you sincerely apologize for your behavior that weekend. “I definitely wasn’t as grown up then as I thought I was.”

“Neither was I,” he extends his own subtle offering of apology. “I said some stupid shit.”

It’s totally strange, to not be bickering or calling each other names, and you need to point it out, “Just to be clear, this does not mean that I like you.”

“Sure. I don’t like you either,” he jibes back, adjusting his hands in front of him into a stuffy, upright stance. “Polite neutrality is the politician’s way, yeah?”

You nod in acknowledgement, but there’s that drop of disappointment again. The thought that you might’ve had a ton of fun together at the debates, making fun of all the stuffy old men your fathers went up against. 

“So, what are you doing here?” You ask, though his name tag gives you enough of an idea. You really want to know why he’s here in Boston instead of out conquering the world like he’s meant to do.

Jaehyun nods his head back at the school, “Summer school career fair, just like you.”

“Working at your father’s for the summer?”

“Yep.”

You know Congressman Jung’s software company offers a lot of high school internships and other opportunities for kids to learn data engineering. Their booth had been bustling all day, probably the reason why you didn’t actually spot Jaehyun inside.

“I would’ve expected you to do the typical Capitol Hill junior year internship,” you say.

Though you’re both political science majors, it’s obvious he has the demeanor and star power for a storied career in the spotlight, while you are becoming surer by the day that you want to go into political activism instead.Johnny will be your father’s legacy in this instance, when he takes over S&L in due time.

Jaehyun shrugs, “Thought about it, but it’s the last summer before the real world. Pops would kill me if I didn’t come home.”

That sounds very much in line with the relationship Jung Sr. and Jung Jr. seem to have. They’re just as close as you are to your dad.

“Living at home, then?” You mainly ask to know if you’re going to run into him while you’re out and about in your neighborhood, but there isn’t that much apprehension behind your words anymore.

“Nah, I’m downtown,” Jaehyun answers. “You too?”

“Yep, with Mark by the north—,” you start to tell him exactly where on Newbury your townhouse is, but a small figure coming out of the school doors catches your eye. “Zara?”

It’s one of the seventh graders, her head of beautiful curly hair recognizable anywhere, and you wonder why she’s still here when all of the school buses left campus over an hour ago.

Jaehyun looks at you curiously, surprised that you’ve recognized this student, and you explain, “I sometimes come here during the year to do mentorship.”

You rush over to where the girl is and bend down to ask her,“Zara, are you okay? Do you need a ride home?”

She’s sniffling, which concerns you even further, and she barely is able to get out, “I don’t want to go home.”

You gently guide her to the nearest bench and give her a handkerchief to blow her nose in once she’s sitting down. After her crying has subsided a bit, you venture, “Is everything okay? Do you need me to get one of your teachers?”

“No, but can I talk to you?” She turns her tearful eyes to you, and you hope that this is something you can help with. “I really need someone to talk to.”

“Of course,” you exhale as you put an arm around her. “What’s up?”

“My mom is getting re-married and I’m so sad about it,” her little voice warbles out, and at that, you lock eyes with Jaehyun.

This is a topic that both of you know well. He himself has a step-parent, and you’d lived with the childish fear of your dad re-marrying ever since they’d fought and your mom had left. It’s a part of your existence that overlaps almost intimately, and his eyes soften in sympathy as he watches the two of you.

“Oh, okay. Can you tell me more?” You gently pry.

“I like my stepdad enough, I guess, but I really just feel like this wedding is going to be the worst thing ever,” Zara whispers. “I feel like my mom doesn’t even think about me anymore.”

Your heart wrenches right out of you at that, you know exactly how she feels. Now, your dad hadn’t exactly been preoccupied by impending wedding bells, but you understand that feeling of being alone. Thank god you had Johnny with you all those years.

“I understand, Zara,” you softly run your fingers through the ends of her hair in comfort. “Weddings are supposed to be happy and fun. I’m sure your mom and stepdad are probably a little stressed with planning. But I don’t doubt that they love you so completely and they want you to have the best time on their special day.”

“You think so?” She asks you forlornly, and you wrap your arm tighter around her, hoping that will bring her some relief.

“Okay, so there’s this patch of lavender in the front yard by my house, right?” You murmur quietly, losing yourself fully in the wistful tale you’re spinning for her.“Sometimes when I daydream about my future, like really let myself daydream, I think about that lavender patch. Think about how I’d like to braid a bunch of it into my hair when I get married, and wear a dress that’s white and purple instead of just white.”

You’d intended to tell Zara this to lighten her mood, to help her think about all the lovely details that her mother is putting together. However, there’s also an audible woosh of air, a fermata of affectation that’s come straight from Jaehyun’s lips.

“That’s, that’s so nice, Ms. S,” Zara says dreamily, like she’s been fully enchanted by your tale. But you’re not really focusing on her, you’re staring at him as he’s staring at you, one shared gaze held the length of a lavender’s bud, before you’re giving the girl your full attention again.

“Those are the kind of things you think about while wedding planning. If you don’t know how to bring it up, you could talk to your mom about that stuff first, and then let her know more about how you feel,” you give her the advice, and she nods seriously, contemplating your words in silence.

“Ms. Suh, good, you haven’t left,” you hear from behind your shoulder, and you turn your head to see Principal Weatherbee lingering by the bench.

“I’ll be right back, okay?” You tell Zara, and you only get up to approach the older woman once the girl has given you a head nod of permission.

“Is there something wrong?” You ask the administrator, once you see that she’s holding a file folder in her hands.

She rifles through the papers and plucks out a sheet for you to look at, pointing out a few typed numbers, “Only a small one. We’re supposed to be receiving around $100,000 in scholarship money for our graduating seniors, but we’ve only received $25,000 so far.”

That’s odd. You’d personally sat in the meeting where Henry had approved the money a couple weeks ago. There’d been some back and forth, but Junmyeon in accounting had definitely sent the request through to bookkeeping by the end. So why hasn’t Cambridge Secondary received the money? The scholarships are supposed to be distributed before the seniors leave for college in August.

You wish you had more answers for her, but you’re not in the finance department, and can’t do much more than offer, “Ah, I’m just interning on the outreach team right now, but that definitely is strange.”

“Would you mind passing along the message, then? Here’s the paperwork.”

You’re scheduled in a meeting with everyone from that previous gathering at the end of the week, you can hold onto this until then and bring it up whilst you have everyone’s attention. It’s probably just a transfer error, once you remind them that there’s a deadline for these funds to be moved everything will straighten itself out.

“Of course. You should also follow up with Henry Lau, who’s S&L’s new CFO. Here’s his assistant’s email,” you scribble down Lisa’s contact info on her file folder.

“Thank you, Ms. Suh,” Principal Weatherbee pats you on the shoulder. “It’s always great to have you here.”

You smile at her warmly, grateful for her and her students’ presence in your life, and you turn to head back, hoping that Zara was okay on her own while you were gone.

But she wasn’t exactly on her own, because she’s leaning into Jaehyun on the bench as he hums softly, “My dad got remarried when I was a kid. It was really tough for the four of us, especially for me and Jihyun. But it’s not the end of the world.”

His voice is so tender as he reassures her, a side of him you’ve never seen. You’re so wholly affected by the scene that you stand there dumbly, just listening to them talk.

“It’s not?”

“You’ll have hard days, and there’s always going to be a lot of strange feelings about it. But you’ll be okay,” he does an even better job of cheering her up than you did, if her smile is any indication, and you feel immensely grateful to him for it.

“Zara,” you interrupt them carefully, because you see your car turning into the lot from across the parking lot. “Do you want me to give you a ride home? My driver is here.”

“Yes, please,” she accepts your suggestion, and you take her backpack from her. “Thank you Ms. Suh. Thanks, Mr. Jung.”

“Anytime, Z.” He holds out a fist for her to bump, and she giggles when her tiny fist meets his.

You don’t hate Jaehyun anymore, and you don’t yet like him, but you honestly don’t know how you’re supposed to feel about him right now. Especially with the way his mouth is curved softly as he follows you with his eyes, and with the way he waves to Zara first, the way his dimple pops in his cheek when he turns back to you.

“Bye.”

All you can think is that you maybe should’ve gotten to know him last summer.

“Bye, Jaehyun.”

—

Lisa nudges you to keep from dozing off near the end of the all hands on deck meeting, and she does it at the perfect time for you to catch Mr. Lee ask, “Are there any other issues we need to discuss today?”

He’s Mark dad, and you’ve known him for years, but you still feel the nerves creep up your neck as you raise your hand and tentatively interject, “Sir? I have something.”

“Ms. Suh?” He cranes his neck to spot you from where you’re sitting in the back with the other interns and assistants. “Something in regards to the outreach program?”

“Yes,” you affirm, standing up and nodding to Amber at the projector, who flips on the slide deck you’d put together yesterday.“I was the last one left over at the Cambridge Secondary School career fair, and the principal caught me on my way out.”

The large screen is displaying the disparity in funds you’d spent the past week racking your brains and utilizing your connections to try and explain.

“Around one hundred thousand dollars was earmarked for the scholarship program at Cambridge Secondary, a critical amount of money that will allow students to enroll in various Massachusetts universities that they otherwise wouldn’t be to attend. But for some reason, they’ve only received a quarter of that.”

You hold your head up confidently as you address Mr. Lee, trying to project an air of confidence,

“I don’t mean to overstep any bounds, since I’m not directly involved in the financial department, but I do remember Mr. Kim in accounting sending this through, and wanted to give a reminder to everyone on behalf of the school.”

You scan the room quickly, trying to think of any last way that the request might’ve gotten lost in translation or stalled in approvals. You’re running on empty, mind drawing a total blank as the room looks to you for answers, and then you see it. Or, him.

Henry, lounging in his chair, looking smug. Of course. You should’ve assumed he’d dip a smarmy finger into a project that doesn’t directly benefit him.

“Mr. Lau,” your voice cuts so sharply across the room that everyone flinches. “Do you know anything about this?”

Your hand wants to fly to your mouth in surprise at how bold you’re being, you’re just an intern, you don’t really have the leeway to be calling out the CFO like this, but you’re not _just_ an intern. Everyone still knows who you are.

You barely catch it, the slightest hint of a panicked look between the two older men, but then the company’s head has his claws fully out to his employee.

“Do you have an explanation for this?” Mr. Lee demands, and all of the jaws in the room drop. “Did you block the funds approval?”

Henry fumbles for a second, then fixes his boss with a charming smile, as if he intends to seduce him, “There’s no proof of this, sir.”

“I don’t need proof,” Mark’s dad shakes his head sternly as he stands up from his seat. “I’m the CEO of this corporation. I demand the truth.”

Henry doesn’t apologize or even appear to be remorseful, until CEO Lee goes for the killing blow, “Don’t forget, I put you on the board as a favor to your father, a favor that I can easily take back.”

The entire room titters, you included, because it’s an open secret just how Henry had floated through the ranks at S&L. Sure, your father had originally hired him out of Wharton, but without Senator Lau’s pedigree, Henry would’ve just been another corporate kid in the crowd. You’d been surprised when he was promoted to CFO a few months ago, but you haven’t seen an expose of his gross negligence until now.

Henry snarls as he points an accusatory finger right at you, “If you want someone to blame, you should blame her.”

“Wait, me?”You actually look behind you, to see if he’s talking about someone else, but no. The _her_ definitely meant you.

“Yeah, your father’s name is on the building. If there’s not enough money, it’s his fault.”

You let out a shocked little laugh, completely taken aback by what he’s implying. You snatch a piece of letterhead off the conference table and shake it in his face, pointing out the watermark at the top of the page.

“S&L, Suh AND Lee.” You turn to Mark’s dad and incline your head. “My apologies, CEO Lee, but my father hasn’t been able to set foot in this business since he was elected governor, so how can it be his fault? Moreover, I am just an intern, an intern in outreach. How can I hold any of the blame for this?”

You address the last question directly to Henry, who just stutters in the face of your ire, “I—,”

“If you want me to sell my designer stuff, liquidate my assets to fund this company, I will. But I didn’t ask to be born into this family, and I sure as hell could’ve decided not to work here this summer either.”You’re beside yourself with controlled anger, and everyone is already staring, so you just straighten out the skirt on your dress and pick up your laptop to leave,“Excuse me.”

How fucking dare he? Seriously, not only are you the first daughter of Massachusetts, you are still a student, for god sake! How dare he.

“Y/n,” Henry’s breathless voice is calling after you in the empty hallway, and you whirl upon him in a fury.

“What the fuck are you doing?” You practically yell once you see his pathetic face. “Get back in there!”

His voice starts to simper, lips in a pout, “Don’t be like this. It may not be in our best interest to continue funding these scholarships, especially when resources are low.”

“So, you blockade whatever’s left and hope that no one finds out? Honestly, I’m insulted that you thought this would even work,” you scoff, completely unimpressed. “And you know, deep down, how much good these scholarships do. You know it.”

“Y/n—,” he wheedles again, like he thinks you’re no more than a girl who’d been falsely affected by him at Johnny’s graduation party last year.

His mistake.

“No, do not call me y/n, even though you’re a family friend and I’m just a lowly intern. My name is Ms. Suh,” you proclaim, words fiercer than any set of sharpened knives. “Like you said, my name is on the building. My father has the final say over everything that goes on here, and he loves me more than anything. So move carefully. If you don’t call your contact in approvals right now and have all the scholarships fully sent through, I’ll get you fired. And if you ever, _ever_ try something like this again, I’ll definitely get you fired.Understand?”

You don’t even wait for him to nod, you simply head straight to the approvals office, and wait until Junmyeon shows you that all of the money has officially been sent through. Nobody bothers you for the rest of the day, the story from the meeting undoubtedly spreading through the office like wildfire, but you know you probably won’t get away with it completely.

You’re still fuming by the time you get home from the office, and you shout into your living room for Mark as you take off your shoes, “What a fucking wack day at work!”

There’s no response, so you peek around the corner to see Mark and Jaehyun together on your couch, TV in front of them blasting a Celtics replay.

“Oh. Hello,” you don’t mean to interrupt them, but you’re just so stunned to see Jaehyun in your house that you can’t stop yourself.

They’re both still in their suits, Mark has clearly just gotten back from City Hall, and you really can’t get over the fact that Jaehyun is in your home.

“Sorry,” Mark meets your confused stare with a sheepish grin. “I ran into him on the T home, and I invited him over.”

Jaehyun’s tie is loosened, exposing this hypnotizing little bit of his pale neck, and all you can get out is a, “It’s fine.”

“Why was work so wack?” Jaehyun asks you after he’s taken a sip of the beer in front of him.

“There was some incident with the scholarship money that I had to bring up. Long story short, it devolved into them not just shooting the messenger, but basically demolishing me,” you wince a little as you recall the incident, finally taking the time to fully process Henry’s personal attack against you.

“The Suh name, huh?” He grins knowingly as he pops the lid off another beer and hands it to you.

“Tell me about it,” you groan as you slump onto the loveseat and grab the alcohol from him. “It’s dad’s company in principle, but he hasn’t been allowed to work there since he became governor. Somehow I still got the brunt of it all today.”

You take a long swig of beer and then toss aside your blazer before continuing, “Anyways, the school hasn’t received all of their scholarship money, and Henry Lau didn’t know what the fuck he was doing in that meeting.”

“I’m sure dad was pissed,” Mark chortles.

You nod grimly. “He was. I thought he was going to rip Henry a new asshole.”

Mark’s boisterous laughter intermingles with the pixelated sound of your phone lighting up with a call, and you gulp nervously when you see the caller ID.

“Oh, fuck,” you curse under your breath. “This is my dad calling right now. Pray for me.”

Mark holds up crossed fingers as Jaehyun glances at you in concern while you step out of the room to answer your father, “Hi, papa.”

“Hi, y/n,” he greets you in his usual warm voice, but then he cuts right to the chase. “You’re just on the outreach team at the office, right?”

“Subtle,” you stonily reply, because you don’t deserve a scolding. You don’t.

“No, I mean it was just an interesting call from Eugene I just got.” Of course Mark’s dad had called yours, you’re sure he’d been reporting on all your intern activities since the day you started.

“I’m sorry for what happened in the office today,” you apologize like you know you’re supposed to. “I may have overstepped.”

“Listen, I don’t want you getting involved in anything financial at S&L,” he orders you sternly, in the same fatherly way he told you that you shouldn’t consider an art minor. “That runs us too close to a nepotism line that I don’t think we should cross.”

Of course, your life has to be lived perfectly within the bounds of legality. This is a facet of his argument you can’t compete against, you’d definitely have to police yourself properly.

This time your apology is much more sincere, “I didn’t meant to do it on purpose, the school principal just ran into me as I was leaving and asked me to pass the message along.”

“Oh, I see. That’s good, then,” your dad relents once he really understands what’s going on and what you’d tried to do.

“I mean, I don’t want to get involved in the financial stuff anyways. I didn’t agree to work at S&L just to become a financial analyst. So don’t worry.”

“I won’t,” he chuckles, the stress dissipating from his voice. “You always know what you’re doing.”

You can’t help the swell of pride that bubbles into your chest at your father’s approval.

“Love you, papa.”

“Love you, too,” he reciprocates, then ends the call.

All things considered, that went as well as it could. You only have a month or so left at your job. You’ll just keep your nose out of the financial details, hold your mouth shut during meetings and discussions, and simply find other avenues to bring your issues up if you notice any of them.

Mark and Jaehyun are jabbering on about something when you head back into the living room, and you lean against the wall to observe them.

“What are you two going on about?”

“Oh,” Mark yelps a little in surprise. “Nothing. Everything okay?”

“Yup, just my daily reminder I can’t be a product of nepotism!” You sarcastically bite out, scooping your beer back up and chugging the rest of it.

Jaehyun chuckles, “Easily the most relatable thing you’ve ever said.”

You share a knowing look, and you wonder how many opportunities he’s lost out on because of his father’s legacy, just like you have. Your lobby button dings loudly with a message from your doorman, startling the three of you.

“That should be the pizza,” you explain. “I ordered on the way home from the T.”

“I’ll go down and pick it up, give me a second,” Mark offers, getting up to look for his slippers. Once he’s out of the apartment, Jaehyun suddenly looks out of place.

“I’ll leave you guys, don’t want to disturb.”

He comes across as so incredibly uncomfortable, like he’s just realized he’s been intruding on your and Mark’s regular lives. You don’t want him to feel that way.

“No, it’s okay,” you put a hand over his discarded suit jacket, keeping it hostage so he can’t reach for it. “You can stay.”

The way his dimple creases with his little smile is enough to set your heart alight with a strange inferno of care. He leans back into the couch, finally feeling comfortable, and asks, “You like it? Working at your dad’s?”

“Doesn’t even feel like it’s my dad’s anymore, to be honest,” you admit, something you haven’t even told Mark.

Your dad’s fingerprints used to be all over the company, but you feel like they’ve slowly been eroded way over time. You doubt he’ll take the mantle back up when he retires from being governor, that’s probably when Johnny will take over, and you hope that then, the Suh touch will flourish again.

“But I do like the outreach, I think you can tell I love meeting up with those students.”

“Yeah,” Jaehyun taps your hand with his finger, a familiarly affectionate gesture. “It was super obvious at the school the other day.”

You shift your head so the curtain of your hair disguises the crimson spreading over your cheeks, but luckily your voice is steady when you disclose, “I’m ready to be out in the real world, working for causes I care about.”

Jaehyun thinks for a second, “Furthering education opportunities for underprivileged kids?”

He’s pinpointed your dream job so easily, like you’d been wearing a sign detailing it out exactly. That flusters you so much you don’t want to actually tell him he’d been right on the nose in his guess.

“Something like that,” you vaguely answer instead.

“My dad had a big stimulus package for education planned,” Jaehyun morosely recollects, before he re-realizes that you’re the one he’s talking to. “Oh, sorry, I didn’t mean to.”

He hasn’t offended you. You can still remember the news reports detailing just how much money Congressman Jung had intended to set aside for propelling education forward.

“It’s okay. It’s a part of his platform that I’ve always admired,” you admit honestly.

You do so because you wish your father had adopted the same state-wide budget. You’d brought it up a thousand times over the course of becoming more politically aware, but there were a thousand other things Massachusetts needed to budget for, infrastructure and housing developments and beyond. You had to be satisfied with S&L handing out scholarships.

It’s a poignant shared moment, you acknowledging his father in a positive light for once, and Jaehyun can barely get out a, “T-thank you.”

He opens his mouth to say something else, but Mark returns with the pizza, and that’s that.

Jaehyun doesn’t leave your house until well past eleven that night. When he shows up again two nights later, lobster rolls in hand, you beat Mark to the door to let him in.

—

“Whose house are we going to again?” You huff as you struggle to catch up to Mark, who’s jogging down the hallway with your hand in his.

“It’s just someone I know,” his reply is ambiguous, and he _tsks_ when you frown. “Don’t give me that look, you get me and free alcohol tonight.”

“I could’ve also gotten that at home,” you grumble, not sure why Mark had been so insistent on going out tonight. There’s only two more weeks before everyone will be back on campus and you can begin your final year of raucous debauchery.

“Just suck it up,” Mark orders you as you finally come to a stop in front of an apartment, and he knocks on the door, announcing himself. “It’s Maaaark!”

“It’s open!” Someone calls from the inside, and Mark lets go of your hand to step in front of you.

He pushes the door open at a strangely slow pace. You can only make out the blasting music and dimmed lights inside because you can’t see past Mark’s head.

All at once the music goes silent, and you’re deafened by a booming scream of,

“Surprise!”

You nearly leap out of your shoes in bewilderment, taking a full five seconds to recognize that the mystery apartment is packed to the brim with your friends. All of them, from school and work and debate club, a lot of whom had to travel back to Boston just to be here for your celebration. You’d basically forgotten you were turning twenty-one in a few days, but your best friend hadn’t.

You instantly tear up as Mark presses a kiss to the side of your cheek, “Happy birthday, baby gorl.”

“T-thanks,” you stutter, heart still racing at the absolute volt of shock that had just run through you. “Whose apartment is this?”

Before Mark can answer, you hear someone call your name, “Y/n!”

You turn to see your friend waiting for you in the kitchen, and you run over to snatch her up into a hug. “Minnie, oh my god! I didn’t think you were coming up from the city until next week.”

Minnie grins, holding your hands tightly. “Well, I couldn’t miss your birthday. And I had to visit my babe.”

You snag a cup from the counter to begin drinking, and then you question her, “Your babe? Who are you dating now?”

She points a sly finger across the way, and you follow her direction to see who she’d been referring to.

“Jae—,” you inhale a particularly large gulp of vodka and almost spit it everywhere. “Jaehyun?”

Jaehyun is at your surprise party, and he’s also Minnie’s mystery boo. He’s at the slap cup table in a white v-neck, Washington Capitals cap slung backwards on his head. He doesn’t even realize that you’re staring, engrossed in the game as he is, tongue stuck between his teeth as he tries to concentrate on the ball.

“Sorry for not telling you. He told me you probably wouldn’t like to know.”

No, no. This is something you would’ve liked to know.

“Happy birthday, y/n,” a tall boy congratulates you as he pushes past Minnie for the beer cooler. Instantly mentally dismissing your previous topic of conversation, your jaw drops at the sight of the handsome SME Social Club president, totally stunned that he’s here for you, and more importantly, actually knows your name.

You tug Mark over from where he’s talking to one of your coworkers and you hiss in his ear, “Matthew Kim? Mark Lee, did you invite the whole world to this party?”

“Honestly, yes,” Mark answers, and it’s like his words are connected to the door, because it flies open at that instant.

“Yo, yo! H-dawg has arrived!” Haechan saunters into the apartment with his hands raised in the air like he’s Rocky, and you’ve never been more pleased to see him. He’d taken a startup job in New York this summer so he could be on the same coast as Mark, but you hadn’t had the time to go visit the entire summer.

“Hi Channie!” You squeal in delight, and the words clog in your throat when he moves just a bit to his right. “Johnny?”

His hair is disheveled and there’s a blooming red stain visible on his blue shirt, but it’s Johnny, he’s here in Boston for the first time since he permanently moved to DC last fall.

He holds up a Patriots gift bag, and you feel like crying. “Happy birthday, corn pop.”

You fly into his arms for a bear hug, and you can hear Mark snap a picture, an image you’re going to want later. Once Johnny’s set you down, permanent beam tugging at your cheeks, you notice a familiar head of blonde hair lingering behind him.

“Hi! Wendy, right?”

This is the woman that’s stolen Johnny’s heart, you’ve seen her all over his social media since they started dating almost right after he moved. Apparently they met in Miami when you had been there for Fourth of July last year, and once he found out she was also moving to DC, that sealed the deal.

You’ve been itching for the day you’d finally get to meet her, for the day you’d have a practical sister in law. Of course, the fact that she’s here in Boston probably means she’ll be meeting your father as well, which is a daunting task for anyone. You’ll give her a much easier time.

“Happy birthday. It’s lovely to meet you,” she offers kindly, and you envelop her in a hug, forgoing the artificial handshake.

“You too, I feel like I already know you? Because my idiot brother worships the ground you walk on,” you’re babbling with excitement, so pleased with the way they both blush in embarrassment. “When did you guys get here?”

Johnny puts an arm around his petite girlfriend, then ruffles your hair. “We landed at Logan an hour ago, came right here.”

“I’m so, so, so happy right now, I can’t believe it!” You clap your hands together once, then pluck out an IPA to hand to your brother. “How long are you here for?”

“We’re here until you go back to school, so we rented an AirBnB. This is my first time in Boston, so hopefully you can show us around?” Wendy inquires, still shy around you. You can’t help but hug her again, because the three of you and Mark are about to have the most glorious end of summer.

You end up playing pong together, drinks and laughter flowing freely. You and Wendy absolutely school Mark and Johnny, and then you also beat the combos of Haechan and Mark and Lisa and Mark and it’s just apparent that a) Mark sucks at beer pong and b) you and Wendy get along really well.

She’s from Florida, so she can’t help but gripe at the fact that you’re a Patriots fan, but she’s clerking at the Supreme Court and is incredibly smart and it’s clear she adores your brother. You know you’re drunk when you picture her in the cream bridesmaids dresses you’ve already picked out for your own wedding. You can see her being a blue kind of girl, a color you’ll look great in.

She gets up at some point to refill her drink, and Minnie sits down in the now-empty seat, asking concernedly, “Did I freak you out earlier?”

Your brow furrows, trying to pick out your conversation amidst the dozens you’ve had tonight, and then you hear Jaehyun’s melodical laugh, ringing out into the apartment after some dumb joke Mark has probably told.

Right, she’s dating Jaehyun again, a fact that is totally fine, great, wonderful.

“No,” you shrug, sipping at your drink. “I’m just wondering when all of this happened?”

“After you made him apologize to me last summer, we got to talking, like really talking, and it carried on after we got back to campus,” she details their dalliance out to you in a lovelorn voice, like she’s still as infatuated with him as ever. “I think I tempered my expectations this go around, and so we’ve been seeing each other since the middle of spring semester. I’m fine with it being no strings attached this time.”

“Okay,” you say because there’s nothing else for you to say.

You and Jaehyun certainly still aren’t friends, not really, but you’d thought you’d frostily de-frosted the towering barrier between the two of you, that he’d feel comfortable enough to at least give you a small insight into his life. After all, you’d told him about classes at Harvard (not boys) and your dad and the vacations you were going to take this year.

“Okay? That’s it?” Minnie’s confusion is written all over her pretty face. “I was bracing for a lecture or something.”

“Of course I want you to be safe, but Jaehyun,” you’re searching for the proper end of the sentence when you see your brother wrap Jaehyun up in a hug, as tightly as he’d hugged you when he walked in, and your fingers clench around your cup as you complete it, “isn’t a bad guy.”

“Are you happy?”You wonder out loud, the sick curiosity eating at you.

“Yeah,” she sighs, lost in a dream. “He’s honestly like the nicest guy ever now. He’s really grown up since last year.”

“That’s good,” you hum absentmindedly, then you pat her on the shoulder and stand up. “Gotta fill up my cup.”

This has quickly turned into a bizarre night, you’re not jealous of Minnie or upset by your revelation, because you and Jaehyun fundamentally wouldn’t work and that’s not what you want from him. But you know what feels off, and it’s the fact that there isn’t any sort of inherent trust between the two of you. He jokes with your brother and Mark so easily, but there’s still that stifled formality present with you.

There’s no reason to keep a relationship status on the down low, but he had told Minnie not to tell you a thing. He’d been fine prying into your personal life before, and while you’d expected self-induced silence from Minnie, you thought he’d be reassured enough to let that information spill.

Your teeth grit against each other as you step out onto a hidden patio, tucked out of view of a back hallway. You can recognize that while you’ve been him telling more personal information, it had all been glazed over with superficiality and platitudes, and it is obvious he wouldn’t trust you if it comes off like you don’t trust him.

You’ve been working on it for a year, per Mark’s request, but it’s hard. You’re trying to give up those tightly guarded pieces of yourself and getting nowhere.

“You like my place?” A low voice startles you, and there’s Jaehyun, with his cap now missing. Wait… his place?

You glance at the brick wall behind you and there’s a very large Georgetown flag hanging from it. Displayed proudly beside it is a large flag for Boston College and one of those familiar blue _Jung Sr. for Governor_ campaign signs.

“Oh wow, I should’ve known,” your smile is tinges with chagrin as your cheeks prick with pink at the idea of your birthday party taking place at his home. “It’s very you.”

“Thank you.”

He leans against the railing, gazing off into the twinkling Boston nighttime, and the two of you stand there in silence. You wonder if he’s going to bring up Minnie being here. You won’t pry, but you will keep that interesting fact folded into a corner of your mind.

You speak up quietly, words dissolving into the night air, “This is like, the nicest birthday I’ve ever had.”

“Really?” Jaehyun’s eyebrows shoot up in astonishment. “I would think your family would’ve thrown you some real bougie celebrations.”

Yes, you’ve had some incredibly extravagant parties, you’d even rented out the Top of the Hub one year, but that’s not really you. “I mean. Everyone I love is here, and that’s just, the best.”

It’s the truth, Mark and Minnie and Johnny and Haechan are all here. You’d been flattered that Matthew Kim took the time to show up, and you’ve made a certain friend for life in Wendy. Your little heart is full to the brim.

“You’re not what I thought.” You completely miss the way Jaehyun marvels at you, expression overcome by a starlight’s worth of luminous sentiment.

“Wow,” you gasp in mock offense. “Shocking admission from Prince Jung himself.”

He laughs, high and airy, and you can’t help but join along, the two of you conducting a symphony of merriment alone out in the night.

“Isn’t it kind of weird that we’ve like, actually been to each other’s houses and stuff this summer?” You muse after you’ve calmed back into comfortable quiet. “And like, legitimately hung out? It’s not the requisite week long trip to the Hamptons followed by a disappearing act for the ages.”

He purses his lips, asking tentatively, “Would you rather it be the Hamptons way?”

You hope to never get back to that point again, you can’t take the stress balled in with the anxiety, all that negative tension and yelling. Is it wrong to hope that you’ve both changed for good.

“No, no,” you shake your head quickly. “I’m not saying that this is a bad thing.”

“Good. Me neither,” he admits, and he spends a second fidgeting with the pearl bracelet that seems to always sit on his wrist.

You’ve always been curious about it, so you ask, “What’s that bracelet? It’s quite pretty.”

Though his mouth tightens, he doesn’t frown. But he doesn’t open up either.

“Just a family thing, I wear it all the time.”

He’s probably afraid you’ll take it as an opportunity to speak poorly about his family, something you will try not to do again, at least not to his face. That’s a habit you can’t erase entirely.

‘That’s nice.”

“By the way, happy birthday. This is for you,” he turns to pick up a little box that’s been resting on the chair by the sliding door.

You’re instantly touched, though you don’t know what’s inside, and you feel inclined to protest, “You didn’t have to get me anything, it was enough to offer up your apartment for this party.”

“Just open it,” he shoves the box into your hands and looks away, rubbing at the back of his neck. It might be the light, might be the way his eyes are fooling you, but his cheeks can’t be that exact cotton-candy shade, can they?

Your fingers lift up the cardboard, and the breath is stolen right out of your breath, “Oh.”

It’s not much, it’s just a pristine sugar cookie from one of the downtown bakeries. It’s gently nestled into a spread of white tissue paper, all of it so ivory and heavenly. But there’s one little splash of color amongst all of the alabaster glory. On the expanse of white frosting is a comet of purple, a tableau painted of one bud of a lavender flower.

Jaehyun is far too much for you right now.

He flicks a lighter on, adding a glittering flame to the candle, and his face is set aglow when he prompts you, “Make a wish.”

Your eyes flutter closed, your mind shouts the very first thing that rolls through it, and then you blow out the flame.

“Are you going to tell me what you wished for?” Jaehyun whispers, voice catching over the words.

You keep your eyes closed, because you don’t want to see what he looks like.

“You know I can’t.”

“Hey!” Johnny bellows as he appears and snatches your arm, the box nearly careening out of your hands. “We need a fourth for slap cup, let’s go!”

You’re too startled to do anything but allow your brother to pull you off the patio. But you’re kind of upset, because you didn’t even get to thank Jaehyun for his gift, maybe the sweetest gift you’ve ever gotten.

You’re so convinced you need to thank him that you keep looking up at the hallway throughout the game, hoping to see him emerge. You go through a turn, and then another, and even re-set the game so Haechan and Lisa can join, but Jaehyun doesn’t emerge.

When he finally reappears, stepping out from the patio to meet Minnie in the hallway and pull her into his bedroom, you catch it all as you’re waiting for Mark to take his turn.

The happiness sours in your chest way too rapidly, and it sits there and lingers because you don’t see him for the rest of the night. He doesn’t even come out to say goodbye to you and Mark, even though you’re the last ones to leave.

You toss the white box back and forth between your hands as two of you walk home from the T, and then you drunkenly murmur, “Thank you for planning this for me, Marky.”

“Anything for you, baby gorl,” he snuggles his face into yours for a second, and then he pulls away very seriously. “It wasn’t just me though. It was me and Jae. You almost caught us the other day at home when we were planning.”

The box stills in your hands.

This is a extremely frustrating case of Jaehyun Jung, because he’d planned you a birthday party and gotten you a lavender cookie, and had done so while decidedly not telling you he’s been dating your friend.

Something’s gotta give here.

—

You’ve just finished an incredibly long day at the office, it’s past nine and you’re only just leaving, and you really don’t have any patience for the way Henry sidles up to you.

You flash him a polite smile, preparing to get the hell out of your cubicle, when he asks, “You heading out for the night?”

You don’t look up from backing your bag, only biting out a, “Yep,” but then you notice he isn’t leaving you alone.

“Did you need something?”

“Heard it was your twenty first the other day,” Henry nonchalantly drops that with practiced easy, leaning back against your desk as he eyes you. “Want to grab a drink?”

You don’t feel flattered by him anymore, not in the least, not in the slightest, not ever. His gaze has too much lewdness in it for you to feel anything but disgusted.

You zip your bag closed after your laptop is safely inside, and you set a stern gaze upon your senior. “You do know that Mark Lee is my very best friend, right?”

Henry’s brow furrows. “What? What does that have to do with a drink?”

“I’ve known him almost my whole life, we went to high school and Harvard together. When we’ve both graduated, and CEO Lee is looking for someone to marry his son, he’ll look to me first.”

You really have to keep from laughing, because Mark is as much of your brother as Johnny is and you’d never, ever want to be with each other like that. But Henry doesn’t know that. If he’s as scared of Mr. Lee as you think he is, he’ll definitely leave you alone after this. You acknowledge that you’re lucky you come from a place filled with enough privilege that you can stand up to him in this way.

“If I’m worthy of Mark Lee, you can be sure as hell I’d never stoop down to a level occupied by you,” you cut him down haughtily, powerful and unstoppable. “Also, like my father would ever consider you.”

Henry’s jaw drops in total shock at your evisceration of him, and you only remove yourself from his vicinity with a curt, “Excuse me.”

You’re not even a step into the stairwell when your phone goes off with a number you don’t recognize, but you answer anyways, “Hello?”

“Y/n?” A watery, yet recognizable voice echoes through your speaker.

“Wendy?”

Johnny’s girlfriend is audibly sniffling on the other end, and she has to painfully force the words out, “You, you need to get to the M. G. H.? As soon as you can.”

The M. G.—, oh god.

“Wait, Mass Gen?” Your voice hitches in panic as you piece together the acronym. “What the fuck is going on?”

“It’s John, he, uh,” she’s freely sobbing now, voice cracking here and there. “He was in an accident.”

The nausea explodes into your body at her words, the panic in your voice now throbbing right down into your veins. Johnny is in the hospital. He’s in the hospital. This is literally your worst nightmare come to fruition, there are literally a limitless number of things that could’ve happened to him, yet your mind goes straight to the most nefarious. A mugging, a drunk driver, an _assassination attempt_.

You’re a prominent political family with notoriously lax security. Of course that’d be a possibility.

“I’m coming. If you see anyone that looks like a reporter, do NOT talk to them!” You order her, and literally take off into a run to the train, even in your heels.

By some higher power’s grace, you arrive at the station right when a train is rolling in, and luckily Massachusetts General Hospital is only one stop away on the line you’re on. You run the 400 meter dash of your life as you exit the station, and it’s only minutes later that you crash through the doors of the emergency room.

You nearly make yourself sick with whiplash as you frantically search for Wendy. You’re bowled over by the tiny girl launching herself at you, breaking down completely as you catch her in your arms.

“I’m here, I’m here,” you soothe, though the alarm is still brewing violently in your body. “Somebody tell me what the fuck is going on.”

Jaehyun is somehow there in the waiting room too, hair sopping wet and Capitals shirt soaked through. He places a comforting hand on Wendy’s back as he shakily explains, “We were out hanging on the esplanade when he tripped and fell. He hit his head pretty bad on the dock and fell into the Charles. I dove in after him, but luckily some EMTs were walking by as it happened and pulled him out for me.”

“He’s unconscious and getting a CT scan right now,” Wendy tells you between her sniffles. “So we’re waiting for the doctors.”

One poisonous tendril of concern loosens its grip on your heart, because all of the worst case scenarios you’d imagined hadn’t happened. You’d be able to keep this low-key until your dad gets here and can deal with it all. Obviously you’re still worried beyond belief for your brother, knowing that a head injury is very problematic.

“Does my dad know?” You ask, needing to know if you have to alert him and his staff.

“I called him,” Wendy affirms, and you can’t imagine what sort of phone conversation that had been. “He just got on a flight from DC.”

“Hehe, y/n, baby gorl, you’re here?” A spaced out voice comes from behind Wendy and Jaehyun, and you tilt your head to see who it is.

Mark is sitting on one of the waiting room chairs, blankly happy look pasted across his face as he chuckles and waves at you. Your blood runs cold.

“Mark Lee, are you? Are you _high?_ ” You hiss, and he nods without a care, laughing even harder. “You were high, in public?!”

Mark makes eye contact with Jaehyun, and then he nods again.

You whirl upon Jaehyun in an instant, shoving him away from you and cursing loudly, “You fucking asshole! Is this your fault? Is it?”

You don’t have a problem with weed, really, you don’t. It’s been legal here for years, and you’ve passed around a joint at a few parties at school. But there are so many more consequences for someone of your status if you’re caught with it publicly, let alone get in a serious medical catastrophe because of it. You can practically see the headlines writing themselves.

You know Mark has never smoked, it’s his go-to _never have I ever_ fact. But Jaehyun, you know he and his buddies must smoke up a storm in the NCT house. Johnny told you that himself.

“Answer me! “ You push at him again. “Was it you?!”

Jaehyun raises his hands to block you, but doesn’t answer your furious queries, only inciting your anger further. He’s totally guilty. Is this just his sick way at getting back at you for stealing his turn in the spotlight? By taking down your family like this? His dad had gone to the feds about those kids at Boston College and gotten all of them expelled, turned all of their lives completely into the shitter. You don’t care how much weed they had had, they were just kids.

You can’t let that happen to John. You can’t.

“Y/n! Y/n!” Wendy’s tearfully pleading with you. “Please calm down.”

“Y/n, stop!” Mark cries, frightened in his intoxicated state by how angry you are.

A receptionist grabs your wrist and pulls you out of the fracas, warning you sternly, “Ma’am, if you don’t calm down, we’re going to have to ask you to leave the premises.”

You yank yourself out of his grasp and straighten out your blazer, trying to pour all your loathing in the piercing glare you send right through Jaehyun as you bite out, “It’s fine, I need to cool off, anyways.”

You stalk out of the hospital, mashing your heels as hard as you can into the concrete to try and generate some kind of cathartic release. You hear footsteps following you, and you picture that person’s face right under your feet as you stomp.

“I let you into my life and this is what I’m rewarded with. I knew you were bad news,” you growl to the air in front of you.

“I swear, I didn’t do anything,” Jaehyun sounds contrite, but you don’t trust him as far as you can throw him.

“Like I fucking believe you,” you spit out, so incensed by his presence here. “Isn’t it a rite of passage to become a practical stoner once you join NCT?”

“No, no,” Jaehyun raises his hands in self-defense. “John had the weed!”

You cannot believe him. You cannot fucking believe him.

“Okay, so you’re blaming my brother now?”

“Y/n, I don’t smoke, I don’t. I wasn’t high then, and I’m not now,” Jaehyun sounds close to tears of frustration, voice cracking with effort as he tries to control himself. “He had the weed, they wanted to smoke, so I let them do it in my house, then we took a walk by the river.”

Your argument is stonewalled by the appearance of a nervous looking nurse, glancing between the heated pair of you in concern as she asks, “You’re John Suh’s next of kin?”

“Yes, he’s my brother,” you confirm, the sea of nausea rising its tide over you. “Is he okay?”

She reads right off his chart, “He has a concussion and swallowed a lot of water, so we’re going to have to keep him overnight. But he’ll be fine.”

You feel a sharp pinch of pain in your side, and register it as a shot of relief, coursing its way all the way straight through you.

“Oh, oh my god,” you choke up, tears building up in the corners of your eyes. “Thank you.”

She nods kindly and is about to turn back to head inside, when she notices your companion, “Mr. Jung? I haven’t seen you here, since…”

Jaehyun’s mouth hardens for a second, and he tugs you away so you’re out of earshot, not responding to the nurse but instead pleading with you, “Y/n, I swear to you, it was just an accident. I don’t smoke, never have. Weed kind of ruined my life, actually.”

Johnny might be out of the woods health-wise but there is still a depth of trouble he can get into.

You cross your arms and ask him, “Okay, do they think he was high?”

“I don’t know,” Jaehyun admits, shaking his head. “I’m sure they can pick that sort of thing up in his blood.”

“This can’t get out, it’s legal here and people shouldn’t care but you know that they do. Public figures have been cancelled for less,” you sigh in frustration, running a hand through your hair and hoping your dad had the foresight to call the legal and publicity teams.

The same thought from earlier pricks into your mind. Had Jaehyun orchestrated this just to take down your family in some kind of revenge plot, to get back at you for taking the governorship from his father? Johnny being caught smoking once wouldn’t force your father to resign or anything, but you have no idea just how much weed your brother had if both he and Mark had been smoking. You can’t imagine anything positive would come out of this getting out to the public.

“Are you,” you whisper, suddenly terrorized by the power he has over you. “Are you going to tell?”

Jaehyun takes a step back, stunned at what you’re asking him, but you have to. He is just like his father, in more ways than one. You have to know, so you can protect your family. It’s just you right now.

“Ma’am?” The nurse peeks her head out of the doors once again to catch your attention. “You can go in and see him if you want now.”

Your shoulders sag with respite, and you blow past Jaehyun to walk back into the hospital, barking out, “Wendy, Mark, come on,” before you can be instructed any further.

“They said only one person at a time,” Wendy sniffs quietly. “You should go first.”

This just won’t do. Wendy is probably the love of your brother’s life, and Mark cannot be left alone in his state. You don’t need the _rich boys throw drug-fueled party_ news stories breaking tomorrow.

You draw yourself up to your full height, fixing the staff and the nurse with a gaze holding all of the authority the Suh name provides you. Then you declare, “John is the governor’s son. We’ll go up together and I’ll deal with the consequences later.”

They cower a little in your face and don’t say a word as you load up into an elevator that takes you up to the third floor. The tiny space crackles between your pounding fury, Wendy’s hopelessness, and Mark’s confusion. Jaehyun bristles tensly beside you all, the one person who should’ve been blocked from coming up with you.

The doors open, Wendy strides ahead, and you pull Mark out with you.

“Eat this,” you shove a granola bar from your bag into his hands. “You better be fucking sober by the time your dad comes by.”

“I’m sorry! John had the weed, and I thought it would be fun to try!” Mark garbles out through a mouthful of granola bar, oblivious to your mood. “I’ve never smoked at Harvard haha, can you believe that? Wait, are you mad that I smoked?"

He stares at you, curious, and you pat his shoulder softly.“I don’t care if people smoke weed, Mark. You know that. I only care when it lands them in the hospital like this.”

“I’m sorry,” he pouts, dropping his head, upset at disappointing you.

Your silly best friend, you know he didn’t mean to hurt anyone. “I know.”

“You probably owe Jae an apology, though,” Mark’s eyes dart to the man who’s still standing by the elevator. “You called him an asshole when he didn’t even smoke.”

 _When he didn’t even smoke._ Mark is too high to cover for his friend. So, that must be true, but it doesn’t change anything. Not really.

“Okay, you go see John with Wendy. I’ll be right in,” you push him in the direction of the room and he obediently follows your brother’s girlfriend down the hall.

You turn to approach Jaehyun carefully, and he blurts it out before you can say anything, “I’m not going to tell anyone, I swear.”

You’re totally lost, you feel like you’re just a kid that’s been thrust into the protector role. You have no idea if you can put your rational mind and trust him like your personal feelings are telling you to. His handsome face is just a bit too kind to belie a malicious heart, but you need to have an overabundance of caution.

“I, can you just, can you just leave me and my family alone?”

Jaehyun’s eyes widen, both of you caught off guard by what comes out of your mouth.

“I’m sorry, for calling you an asshole. And thank you, for diving in after John. But my dad’s not here and my brother is unconscious because he almost _drowned_ , and I just. I don’t know what I’m supposed to do.” You feel tiny and lonely because it’s really just you, the tears are bubbling up at your eyelids, crystal droplets of turmoil spilling down onto your cheeks.

“I’m sorry,” he whispers, fisting the hem of his wet t-shirt into his hands.

Your sentences are climbing peaks and tumbling into valleys as this onslaught of emotion tears you apart, “We’re just, we’re just too different. The spotlight is so much for us sometimes and you, you don’t have to live that life and I’m so jealous of you for that.”

You gasp a little, totally surprised by that revelation escaping you, but it’s true. You’re jealous of him, because he doesn’t have to deal with anything like this. You’re jealous and irrational and you’re totally consumed by it all.

“You have the perfect life, you go to a school that you picked yourself, you have the job that you want and the girlfriend that you want—,” you’re completely unraveling at the seams, overcome with just how much this is affecting you.

“Hold up,” Jaehyun interrupts you. “You know about Minnie?”

You laugh bitterly, recalling your birthday party, how trivial everything had seemed then.“You think she wouldn’t tell me? Girl code, even if you asked her not to.”

“So on top of everything, you’re also mad I didn’t tell you about someone I’m dating.”

“No, it’s not that.”

“Then what is it?”

Your head might explode from the awful tension, the way Jaehyun’s sad eyes are boring into you, the way you know what you say next will carve right through him.

“All I can think about is your dad going to the feds about those Boston College kids and I am afraid you will do that to John,” you choke out and the moment he clenches his eyes shut you just know you’ve permanently ruined him. “I look at you and I want to believe you’re not that kind of person, but I just can’t, okay?”

Jaehyun must be the consummate gentleman because he just politely inclines his head at you, “I’ll go. Should I come back tomorrow?”

“Just, just don’t come back for a little while, okay?” You beg him, because seeing him again will send you right over the edge. “Please?”

“Okay.” He agrees, and then he breathes out once more, “Sorry.”

Yeah, you’re sorry too.

You don’t wait for him to leave before you’re running down the hallway to Johnny’s room, chest caving in with relief when you see that he’s awake and talking to Wendy.

“Hey, corn pop,” his voice is raspy from the water damage, but you’ve never been so grateful to hear his voice before.

“Oh, Johnny,” your face crumples with a fresh round of tears as you make your way over to his bed and grip his hand. “The doctors told me you went on a real ride there.”

“I feel like I just swam to hell and back,” he groans, shifting in his bed so he can get a better look at you. He then swears, “I’m never smoking again.”

All of you in the hotel room laugh darkly at his joke, and you have to ask him, “Where did you even get that?”

“Some dude at your birthday party, I don’t even remember exactly,” he drifts off, and then his other hand comes to cup your face. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

“It’s okay. Please, please be careful next time, though.”

“I will,” he promises, and then his eyes shutter closed as he goes back to sleep, exhausted.

Wendy crawls into the bed next to Johnny and knocks out completely, and Mark dozes off with his head on Johnny’s leg, bent over fully in his chair. You let out a cavernous sigh, torn apart so thoroughly by the events of the night, and you don’t even realized you’ve fallen asleep yourself until someone is shaking your shoulder.

“Y/n, y/n, wake up.”

You look around blearily, hoping it’s not a nurse trying to kick you all out, and then your body finally gives out in abatement.

“Papa.”

Your father is here, Mr. Lee on his heels, your family lawyer Maxwell Shim in the waiting room along with the various familiar faces from the publicity team. You bury yourself into his enveloping hug, so comforted by the parental embrace that you finally feel like everything’s going to be okay.

He turns to Johnny, and you are not prepared for the way that he shakes your brother awake, tendons in his neck cording as he addresses his son, “John, were you smoking? Answer me!”

Johnny is completely dumbfounded, as are you, so shocked by this display of aggression from your usually placid father.

You scramble out of the chair, wedging yourself in between the two men and fixing your father with an intense stare. You feign major, major ignorance, “What? Why would you think that, papa?”

He’s never really cared about this, he was one of the first people who called Congressman Jung out after the BC incident, anyways, for not standing by his constituents. But the two of you share the same mind, and you know he’s wondering if there’s going to be a news report about this. Though the doctors are sworn to secrecy by their oath, you can’t underestimate leakers and gossip tippers, so there is a big chance the public could find out about this accident.

But you’re going to hedge your bets on a major, major lie. Something’s telling you you need to cover for your brother.

“They were drunk,” you blurt, and your dad’s head snaps back in disbelief. “We grabbed drinks after work and the boys kept going after I had to run home. Accidents happen sometimes, Papa.”

You turn your head and Wendy and Mark are both nodding along with your story.

“Minhyung,” Mr. Lee snaps at Mark using his legal name. “Let’s talk.”

Mark’s eyes blow wide and he stutters quietly, “Y-yes, dad.”

You squeeze his hand as he gets up, obediently following behind his father as they find a place to have a private chat. You can only hope that sleep and a snack has helped him enough to keep the façade up.

“I just had one too many drinks, y/n’s right, I’m sorry,” Johnny is apologizing quietly to your patriarch. “I don’t have a drinking problem, don’t worry.”

“Does anyone else know you’re here?” Your dad inquires, wanting to be prepared as best as he can.

“Um, just us, and Jaehyun was there with them,” you let him know, his brow furrowing in confusion at the unfamiliar name. You clarify, “Jeffrey Jung’s boy. But, I don’t think he’ll gossip.”

Jaehyun won’t. He won’t.

Your father groans out loud, rubbing hand all over his face, but luckily, he doesn’t do anything else rash, “Ugh, you’ve made a huge mess of things, John. You’re lucky that y/n seems to have everything under control. Get some sleep.”

He exits the room to reconvene with his staff, and you let out a breath you didn’t register you were holding.

“Sorry,” Johnny mumbles to your turned back. “Thank you for that.”

You turn, pressing a soft kiss to his cheek, and whisper, “It’s okay.”

You hug him extra tight, because your dad had somehow forgotten to. This is that sort of moment, that sad, poignant little second of time that you want your mother with you here. She used to hug on you so tightly, the affection brewing in her spilling onto you, more comforting than any other person you’ve known.

Everything is back to normal the next day, your dad is attentive, caring and emotionally overwhelmed as he tends to Johnny, whose head is healing up quite nicely, all things aside.In fact, you even walk into your father tearfully embracing Stephanie Jung as they pray by Johnny’s bed togther when you come back after lunch.

The sight of her is abrupt and out of nowhere, you haven’t crossed paths with her since John’s graduation party. When she hugs you, you can’t help but wonder if Jaehyun asked her to come by.

Because he respects your request and doesn’t show up to the hospital again. In fact, you don’t see him once more for the rest of the summer.

**tbc.**

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hope you enjoyed! this whole thing will be around 10 ish chapters but not entirely sure how i'm going to break all them up


	3. fantastical

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Having to hate Jaehyun again means that they’ve definitely broken up, or ended whatever the hell they were doing. That means Jaehyun’s single, he’s free to do whatever he pleases.

If precedence followed history, you wouldn’t have seen Jaehyun again until the next summer.

But you have to know by now that the world simply doesn’t work like that. Case in point, the fact that you’ve just run into him outside of the SME house right now, the SME house here in Cambridge, a city that he doesn’t live in, at a school he doesn’t go to.

“Jaehyun,” you address him neutrally, so unsure of where you stand after everything that’s transpired between you two.

He’s dyed his hair black during his senior year, and gotten another piercing in his ear. Maybe a tattoo, too, if the smudge of black on the part of his exposed collarbone that peeks out from behind his dress shirt is any indication.

He smiles thinly as he walks by you to head inside. “Y/n.”

Your eyes only narrow when you see who’s directly behind him. Mark and Haechan, together in matching purple and red paisley sport coats, totally guilty expressions written all over their faces. They try to follow their friend to the house right quick, but they won’t get away with it this easily.

“Nuh-uh, not so fast,” you hold out an arm, clotheslining Mark from walking any further. “Care to explain?”

“Well it’s our last social club formal ever, and Exy was still dateless yesterday, which isn’t fun for anyone,” Mark nervously rambles, looking from his best friend over to your disapproving glare. “H was already going to road trip up from Georgetown, so I offered up Jaehyun for her.”

“Yeah, we drove up together last night!” Haechan adds, as if that will ameliorate the situation.

Exy is tall and willowy, with beautiful auburn hair and a charming smile. You can’t imagine that a someone in a relationship would allow their boyfriend to come all the way up here just to take a random girl he’s never met to her social club formal. You say as much,

“Hard to believe Minnie would be okay with that.”

Mark and Haechan share another look, and Mark gently pushes your arm out of the way, muttering lowly, “You might want to text your friend some more if you’re that out of the loop.”

They walk past you and enter the house, leaving you out on the sidewalk, still totally confused. You’d received your latest Minnie and Jaehyun update only a few weeks ago, a picture of them at her own sorority’s formal. But you haven’t had time to really catch up with her since then, you don’t suppose things have fallen apart that quickly?

> [8:45 pm] **you:** yo how’s it??? sorry grad prep has been crazyyyyyy.  
> [8:45 pm] **you:** you still in for turks, right?  
> [8:46 pm] **the mouse herself:** i am so excited for turks, ive been dyingggg  
> [8:46 pm] **the mouse herself:** too many finals and parties all at once.  
> [8:46 pm] **the mouse herself:** heard thru the grapevine jae was going up to harvard this weekend

This is it, this is the morsel of information that will satisfy your piqued curiosity, but Mark sticks his head out the door and hollers, “Come on, get off your phone so we can drink!”

You stick your phone in your purse before she answers, and make your way inside the house, totally unprepared for the night that’s about to unfold.The small talk is already buzzing throughout the kitchen as people make drinks and mingle, and Jennie and Jaehyun are already deep into a discussion by the keg.

“So you guys are in the same frat at Georgetown?” Jennie asks him as you move a random Tiffany box aside to grab a cup loaded up with vodka. she'd probably gotten ready down here, if the makeup on the counter is any indication, so you pay it no mind as you wave at Lay from across the room, and then you subtly listen in.

“Yeah, Nu Chi Theta,” he tells her as he fills his own cup. “I’m just up here for the day. Gotta drive back tomorrow for our last chapter meeting.”

“What’s your name again?” Rosé chimes into her friend’s conversation. “You seem really familiar, sorry if that’s creepy.”

“It’s chill. I’m Jaehyun. Jung,” he re-introduces himself and shakes her hand, and once she takes a second to process, her face lights up in recognition.

“Wait, I know you. You’re Congressman Jung’s son, right?”

“Who?” Jennie asks, totally lost to the world of American politics as an international student.

“Congressman Jung, Boston’s old rep? He ran for governor like, oh I don’t know, almost seven years ago,” Rosé explains Jaehyun’s father’s identity for him, as a journalism major, she’s probably well versed in these matters. “Ah, I forget you’re not from Massachusetts, Jen. He was a cool dude, both my parents voted for him.”

It’s as if all the commotion comes to a grinding halt, because everyone turns to look at you at the exact moment she says that. You raise your cup awkwardly, and then take a huge drink out of it.

“Ah, sorry, y/n,” Rosé apologizes for her misplaced comment, because that meant her parents voted against your dad. But it doesn’t bother you anymore, seven years in, it’s all part and parcel of being the governor’s daughter.

“Don’t be,” you brush it off without a care, and people go back to their conversations.

Rosé glances back to Jaehyun from you, and then she puts it together, “So, you two must know each other, right?”

Knowing each other is an understatement, because you’re thrown back to the night in the hospital with Johnny, you crying over him and his father, his profuse apologies, his reluctant yet respectful fade out from your life after an attempt at friendship. You know him too well, but in all the wrong ways. You need to banish that night from your mind if you’re going to make it through this one.

Jaehyun glances at you through the fringe of his bangs, and lets out a throaty, “Yup.”

There is no more to his answer, and for that you’re grateful. There’s no need to get into it here, there’s no need to get into it, ever. You know he and Johnny went back to their usual camaraderie upon their return to DC, so you’ll let them have that and fade into the distance.

“Wait, y/n, are you here with Mark?” Jennie’s noticed your solo presence, and now everyone is curiously staring again.

You shake your head, taking another sip of your drink. “No.”

“You know we love you, but you do realize this is the SME Social Club formal, right?” Rosé points out, like you’d randomly just shown up without an invitation to their exclusive society’s invitation only event.

“I’m here with an SME member,” you affirm, because you had been asked to be here.

Jennie purses her lips around her cup, then investigates further, “I’m confused, if you’re not here with Mark, then who are you here with?”

You feel an arm sling around your shoulders, and a deep voice answers, “She’s here with me.”

Both Rosé and Jennie’s faces go a little giddy, the green underclassmen they are, when they realize just who your date is, “Ooooh. Hi, Matthew.”

“Hey girls,” Matthew Kim, retiring president of SME and your date for the night, greets them with a wink, then does the same to you. “Hey, princess.”

“Hello,” you smile at him politely, staggering a little under the weight of his broad frame.

Truth be told, Matt’s text invite had come totally out of the blue for you. You’d barely given him a second thought after he’d shown up at your birthday party, mostly because you and Mark had stopped going to SME parties this year in favor of going out to bars now that you were both legal. You don’t know too much about him. But you know the fundamentals, Matthew is tall and ridiculously hot, and his father works at S&L in some capacity, you’re pretty sure. He wouldn’t be a bad person to spend some time with.

"Thanks for this," Jennie giggles as she taps the little blue jewelry box you'd noticed earlier, and all your date does is wink at her. Ladies' man, ladies' man, no wonder everyone seems to be swooning around you.

You don’t entirely see the way Jaehyun misses the cup with the keg in his distraction, because Mark is suddenly tugging you out of Matthew’s grasp, “Y/n, let me steal you for a second.”

He drags you into the deserted living room, and it’s only after he’s checked the corners to make sure you’re fully alone that he hisses, “You’re here with Kim? I thought you were here with Zhang!”

You’re not here with the Chinese exchange student, though you know he’d be the sweetest date ever. “Lay? No. But what about it?”

“Matt is a fuckboy,” Mark grumbles, the first time you’ve ever heard him say something negative about his club’s president.

“You invited him to my birthday party last year!” You remind him, how Mark doesn’t have the leeway to be surprised that you two have shown up together.

He throws his hands up in exasperation. “I invited everyone from SME to your birthday party!”

“I’m not here because I’m trying to get with Matt, idiot. I’m here because you were already bringing Chan yet you still wanted me here. He asked me and I thought that was problem solved,” you explain the bizarre turn of events that ended with you on Matthew Kim’s arm, and you hope that will satisfy his sudden protectiveness over you.

“Don’t hook up with him,” Mark orders you, pointing a finger at you sternly, and you can’t help but laugh.

“What, are you John now?” Johnny has never had to go after any boyfriends of yours, has never had to play the protective big brother in that way, and it’s kind of funny that the first go-around for you with this is with Mark instead.

He lets out a deep sigh and takes an equally deep drink from his cup. “I just. Just trust me. I promise that I’m not overstepping when I say this.”

There is a poignant note of emotion in Mark’s voice, like he’s doing nothing but looking out for you like he always does. Though you appreciate it, endlessly, always, what can Matt Kim really do to you? You don’t have delusions of grandeur and you’re not in love with him. If he wants to have sex with you and nothing more, well, that’d be a way to knock it out of the park in your first at-bat.

“Thanks, Marky,” you pat his cheek. “I’ll be careful.”

“Any time, baby gorrrrrrrrrl,” he pats your cheek in return, the two of you hugging it out, each reassured with the other’s promises.

“Hey,” Yuta barges into the living room, bringing the crowd with him. “Let’s play _Fuck-Me Fantasy_ to pregame!”

You’ve played your fair share of drinking games, but you’ve definitely never heard of that one.

“What the fuck is that?” You think you’re whispering under your breath to Mark, but Yuta catches it.

“You’ve never played before?” He asks, genuinely curious.

“No,” you answer absentmindedly, because you’re watching Jaehyun and Exy settle together on one of the loveseats, a little awkward but legs closely touching.

That just reminds you of your earlier conversation, how you’d never followed up on Minnie’s texts to see what she had to say about Jaehyun. You’re half expecting that you’re going to have to send her a tattling note about what her boyfriend is getting up to, when you pull out your phone and see the preview of her text.

> [8:46 pm] **the mouse herself:** we have to hate him again. oops

She’s said it in a euphemistic way, but her message couldn’t be any clearer.

Having to hate Jaehyun again means that they’ve definitely broken up, or ended whatever the hell they were doing. That means Jaehyun’s single, he’s free to do whatever he pleases, and that is apparently draping his arm across the back of the loveseat so that Exy can tentatively lean into him. Interesting.

You look back over at Yuta and shrug, “I don’t even know what that game is.”

He snatches the baseball hat off of Lay’s head and presents it to you with a flourish,

“Everyone will write down their biggest sexual fantasy and put it into this hat. We’ll go around the circle and pick one out, and kiss the person we think it applies to. If it’s not your turn to draw, you have to guess who you think wrote the fantasy. If the person who draws kisses the person you guess, you survive, and if you guess wrong, you drink.”

The room is tittering with scandal at the idea of playing this game, and you join them. Because, you, you don’t do this ever. You don’t talk about sex with strangers, let alone talk about sex with strangers and make out with them. You’re a public figure, for crying out loud, you don’t need any of this to slip out to the media somehow. But these are Mark’s friends, most of them you’ve spent an entire four years with, and you really have no excuse to escape.

Even if Jaehyun’s stare really makes you want to.

“This is idiotic,” you grumble, to hide your nerves. “You don’t even find out who puts down what?”

Yuta winks at you, then hands you a slip of paper, “The mystery is what makes it fun.”

“Write up, princess,” Matthew teases, and then lets out a lewd giggle as he starts to write.

You really only have one thing you can write down. It’s not really a fantasy, it’s just. Something nice. Something nobody really knows about you, so you’ll probably be safe. As the blush blooms across your cheeks, you scribble it down furiously before you can change your mind, fold it up, and deposit it into the hat.

Once you’ve returned back to your seat, Matt puts a hand around your waist, pulling you so you’re flush to him on the couch. He nestles his mouth right by the curve of your ear, and whispers, “You really do look like a princess in that dress.”

You glance down at your outfit. You’d only worn this satin-y, lilac-y thing to match Mark’s predetermined color palette for tonight, but you can admit you look particularly lovely in it. The skirt flows around your legs in a fascinating cascade, and you have your hair pulled up so your elegant neck is exposed.

You lift your head back up, to thank Matthew for his compliment, and Jaehyun is once again staring at you, eyes directly on Matt’s hand. Jaehyun continues to watch you watch him, and you both barely miss Yuta gesturing for everyone to stand up with their drinks, walking over to Mark with the hat.

“Okay, Mark. You first.”

Mark rummages through the slips of paper, plucks one out and unfurls it, and immediately bursts into an incredibly raucous round of laughter.

“I, I can’t read this out loud, holy shit,” he gasps in between his belly laughs, trying and failing multiple times to keep it together enough to recite out loud. He must wheeze for a full thirty seconds before he manages to get out, “My fantasy is to get absolutely destroyed by a someone in a sheep costume.”

The entire group explodes in a firestorm of guffawing, you laugh so hard your mascara starts to run with your tears. Mark is completely stumped and you don’t know anyone in the room well enough to determine who’s a secret furry, so you just choose to take a deep drink of your vodka soda instead.

Mark wanders around the circle, leaning into you in jest before you push him away, and then he gives up and settles for kissing Lay on the cheek. That incites another round of boisterous laughter at what Mark is implying Lay’s fantasy is, but Yuta had been right. The continuous speculation makes it all the more intriguing.

Haechan goes next, picking out a more subdued slip that reads, _I want to be choked, hard,_ and the game gets increasingly entertaining the drunker you get.After Jennie deeply kisses Yuta as a response to her paper, which read, _My fantasy is to go down on a girl in front of my LeBron James cutout_ , you’re passed the hat. You don’t bother to go searching for a slip, you pick the first one you see off the pile.

It’s a boy’s handwriting, blockish and unfamiliar, and your heart twinges with happiness as you read out loud, “To be with my best friend, for real.”

The girls in the group audibly _awww_ , and you feel the same. Being in love with a best friend might be the sweetest thing someone could’ve written down on one of these papers.

As you scan the circle, you skip right over Mark, because you know his handwriting, and Matthew, because he would never put down something like that. You’re almost certain that Lay had been the sheep herder in disguise, and Yuta was definitely Mr. LeBron. That leaves Jaehyun and Haechan. You don’t know anything about Haechan’s love life, but you’re definitely not kissing Jaehyun right now.

You crumple up the paper in your fist and stride over to Haechan. You grab his shoulders and smack a very loud kiss onto his cheek, leaving him with a completely shell-shocked expression on his face.

“Look at him! He can’t believe he got kissed by y/n,” Matthew hollers in laughter as he snaps a picture.

“Yo,” Mark fusses in jest, making a show out of wiping at the spot where your lips had met Haechan’s cheek. “Is there something you want to tell me?!”

You wonder if Haechan has some girl he hasn't told Mark about as he stands there in a daze. So you press a kiss to Mark’s mochi cheek as well, then poke fun at his reaction, “Just kidding.”

“Hey, no fair,” Rosé protests, “Kissing Haechan on the cheek is a cop out!”

“I followed the rules,” you coquettishly reply over a raised shoulder, because Yuta never said you had to kiss on the lips, then you pass the hat to Matthew.

“To have sex for the first time?” He reads aloud from his selected slip, and your heart congeals when he cackles. “Who’s the virg?”

Most everyone is chuckling at his snarky quip, Jaehyun included, but Mark meets your eyes from where he’s standing. Matthew sniffs away a tear, like the idea of a college senior being a virgin is the funniest thing he’s ever heard, then he realizes he has to keep reading.

“Wait there’s more. With someone who means something to me. To have sex for the first time with someone who means something to me.”

The room goes quiet and contemplative, like what’s just been read out loud is actually everyone’s secret fantasy, but Matthew is unaffected by the poignancy of the moment.

“That’s some real girly shit,” he snorts in amusement, gazing out into the circle. He puts a hand under your chin, squeezing your face as he speculates, “Can’t be you, huh?”

You hear Jennie’s low _oooh_ , because Matt has basically just told the entire circle he thinks you’re some kind of sex goddess. You look at Mark in a panic, willing him to do something to get the game to continue on without focusing in on you, but Matthew does it himself.

“Probably Exy, right? Imma go with Exy.”

He steps over to where the girl has been quietly hovering next to Jaehyun, and takes the liberty of making out with her for ten seconds. Jaehyun looks pissed, beyond belief, but you swear his eyes trace a line past the amorous duo, leading right to… you? Nah, you’re definitely drunk and seeing things.

After Yuta goes, and a girl you can’t remember the name of, Rosé picks a slip and announces to the group,

“My fantasy will come true tonight when I get to tear apart a purple dress.”

You freeze, the blood rushing into your ears rending you momentarily deaf. You glance around in a panic, hoping, praying, that any of the other girls are also wearing purple tonight. There’s pink, zebra, even a fluorescent orange, but nope. You are the only one in purple.

Rose rolls her eyes. “This one is so obvious that everyone should drink.”

“Oh yeah, Big Matthew!” Yuta and your date high five as you take a shaky gulp out of your cup.

Matt’s biggest sexual fantasy is to sleep with you, tonight.

Rosé has to kiss your date, per the rules of the game, and you gingerly step aside to give her room to approach him. In doing so, your line of sight bores straight into Jaehyun, who has his fingers threaded so tightly through the edge of his blazer that the skin of his hand is practically colorless. He’s listening to something Exy is whispering in his ear but you recognize that clench of his jaw. Perhaps his signature.

Matt’s chest presses into your side as soon as he’s done kissing his second girl of the night, and his words slither right into your ear, “You like my fantasy, princess?”

“Handcuffs. Lots of handcuffs. One per appendage, at least,” Lay is reading out loud, but you’re not entirely focused on him because Matthew is taking up all of your personal space.

“You are so fucking hot, I swear, I can’t believe Lee's caving and letting me take you out. You’re going to come over after we hit the bars, right? I swear I could do you right here in front of everyone,” he whispers seductively, a particular brand of dirty talk you’ve never been on the receiving end of. His hand maps a pointed path from the arc of your spine down to the swell of your waist, punctuating his intentions.

You’re sure in any other instance that you would’ve done the dress tearing yourself, because Matthew is hot and he wants you.But you’re not entirely focused on that either, because Jaehyun is seething now. Face red not just with the sheen of alcohol, torso heaving not just with the game’s rising excitement.

It’s totally fascinating, the way he’s upset by Matthew. He must really like Exy if he’s this upset by Matt kissing her.

You think you’ve blacked out just a little because suddenly the game is almost at its end. Exy is passing on the hat to her date, goading him on, “Jaehyun, it’s you, you’re the last one.”

He retrieves the very last slip of paper, and hastily reads out the words, “I’d like to get down and dirty with Bill Clinton.”

You cackle particularly loudly when you meet eyes with Mark and his face is molded in complete disgust at the mental picture. You laugh again when the slip is passed to you, and you see the surprisingly neat handwriting detailing their presidential fantasy. Whoever had put that one down surely won the night, you wish you’d thought of something that funny.

“That was imaginative, Bill Clinton,” Yuta chortles as the people around you laugh.

But the humor perishes in your body in an instant, because the last syllable of the president’s name hasn’t even fully burst forth from Yuta’s mouth before Jaehyun’s stalking right over to your tangent of the circle.

You don’t have an iota of time to process what’s going on before Jaehyun’s hands are on your cheeks and he’s kissing you. Your fingers fly to his wrist, to steady yourself against him as his soft lips mold onto yours, and the feel of his pearl bracelet there anchors you down into the present. Jaehyun is kissing you. Jaehyun is _kissing you._

He doesn’t make out with you, doesn’t take the liberty of being saucy like the other men had with girls who weren’t their dates. It’s just a kiss, then his mouth opens for one more, but it’s enough to leave you completely breathless by the time he quickly breaks away and turns back to his spot in the circle.

“Oh my,” Jennie breathes out.

“Everybody drink,” Mark coughs loudly, then distracts the party from what they’d just witnessed. “I know no one had y/n for that one.”

“We should head to the bars anyways, it’s almost eleven,” Yuta suggests once he’s checked his phone. “Everybody, scatter! Outside of the house in ten.”

Matthew slaps you on the back with a warning that he’s going to fix his hair in the bathroom, or something, and the other girls scurry up to their rooms to re-touch their makeup.

But as if you’ve sprouted roots right into the floor, you can’t move a single inch. There is absolutely no way Jaehyun could’ve thought that you had actually had a Bill Clinton fantasy, but he’d gone straight for you as soon as he’d finished reading his slip. Why? That is what spurs you into action, you’re going to find where he’s gone off to and ask him just what about you comes across as a Bill Clinton kind of girl. You’d always been more the Obama type.

You emerge from the dining room, spot a crisp black suit hovering by the alcove under the staircase, and you beeline right in that direction. Jaehyun is pacing back and forth in the little space, hand anxiously rubbing through his hair, making it stick up in a really charming way.

“Hey, Jaehyun,” you call softly, not wanting to scare him, and he whirls around to face you.

His face is totally flushed with heat now, bright red apples sprouting onto the tops of his cheeks, eyes this dark hue of obsidian you’ve never seen on him before. He can’t form a response, his words are caught behind a dam of emotion in his throat, heartbeat caught behind the heavy rise and fall of his chest.

“Why—,” you begin your question, _Why’d you think I’d be into Bill Clinton?,_ but that’s as a far as you get.

Because Jaehyun kisses you again, catching you off-guard in the same breathtaking way he had during the game. Though he holds you softly, his strong hand cradling your neck, his mouth has a motive, to soak in as much of you as possible. You’re malleable and willing, and your mouth opens easily under his, for him to brush his tongue past yours. A strand of your ponytail falls into your face, and you reluctantly move your lips away from his so that you can remove the offending piece.

“What—,” you breathe out, totally affected and surprised by everything about him.

“Shh, just let me kiss you,” he whispers against your lips, dotting another note of care against you before he confesses. “I would’ve kissed you no matter what the paper said.”

Oh. _Oh._

Then you’re completely giving into him, letting him grasp your neck with his long fingers, the warmth splaying over your skin with his, letting his mouth press into yours, sealing you up with strands of affection. It is a mindless amount of kissing, his lips marking a symphony of musical tenderness with yours. While none of it is particularly vulgar, there’s a sort of primal thrill that curls up the back of your spine when his torso fully brushes up against yours and the wall hits your back.

You have no idea where to put your left hand, because your right is clutching at his bicep for dear life. You settle it on the waistband of his pants, right by the seam of his pocket. You’re seized with momentary panic when you feel one of his hands clutch at yours, mind shooting straight to the assumption he’s going to move it to a more nefarious, erogenous zone. But that’s not what he does, he just leisurely lets his thumb curl past yours, lets his fingers hold yours tightly, his bracelet branding into the skin of your forearm.

Even though he’s consuming every inch of your senses, you still have enough presence of mind to notice the creaking of the staircase. You’re pretty out of sight here, but you don’t really know what will happen if anyone discovers this current situation. You lightly push him off you, though you are reluctantly loathe to do so, goosebumps instantly freckling over your shoulders at the lack of proximity.

“Sorry,” you apologize meekly once you hear his frustrated groan. “Someone’s coming.”

Someone is Jennie, clomping down the stairs in her going-out heels as she blows some smoke out of the blunt she's just finished, and she doesn’t even bat an eyelash at the two of you standing on opposite sides of the hallway.

“You want to come downtown with us or are you done for the night?” Jennie asks you as she searches through her purse for something, not suspecting a thing.

“Let’s go!” You answer, flustered but trying to keep up appearances, and you make your way down the long hallway, not bothering to check if Jaehyun is following behind you.

“Perfect, the last Uber is already here,” she chirps happily, running ahead of you and getting into the passenger seat of the waiting car.

“Baby gorl,” Mark hollers, sticking his head out of the backseat window. “Get in here with us!”

He’s crammed into the back of the car, sandwiched in between Haechan to his left and Matthew to his right, and though your mind is currently intoxicated for a variety of reasons, you know that’s not right.

“Wait, no, you miscounted, I won’t fit in that car!”

“Come on, just sit in my lap, princess,” Matt slaps a hand against one of his thighs, and you really don’t want to do that, sit in his lap. Well, not his lap, specifically.

“No lap sitting, ma’am,” the driver informs you in a dull voice, used to the usual antics of college kids.

“You two just order another one and meet us there,” Jennie orders you, before closing the door. “See you there!”

You…. two?As the car pulls away from the house, you turn, and Jaehyun is right behind you, hands shoved into his pockets. This is dangerously approaching the danger zone of danger.

“I’ll call it,” he mutters, fumbling for his phone and tapping through to his apps.

“Where’s your date?” You glance back at the quiet house, wondering if you’re the only two left. “She wasn’t in the car.”

He shrugs without a care. “No idea.”

So it’s just the two of you, out here in the moonlight. You feel overwhelmed with the random urge to atone for the hospital night, even though absolutely nothing about this party should’ve brought up that emotion. Maybe because you feel guilty about it, because Johnny had come out of it unscathed, but especially with the way Jaehyun’s been acting tonight.

You’re so convinced you need to do this you even open your mouth to do so, “I’m sor—,”

“Tell me what your fantasy was. Tell me?” Jaehyun pleads out of nowhere, voice low and prying. “Were you handcuffs or sheep costume?”

You shouldn’t be blushing like this still, but you do. “Neither.”

“Oh?”

There are a limited number of those fantasies you can both falsely admit to and get him to believe. You seriously contemplate confessing to the best friend one, revealing that you’d picked out your own from the hat. But you don’t want to fool him with Mark, like you do with boys you don’t give a fuck about. He deserves the truth.

“I never told you about any Harvard boys,” you whisper nervously, because this is the biggest secret part of you that he’s about to learn, by far. “Because there were never any Harvard boys to tell you about.”

There’s a lot to unpack in your revelation, the unspoken pressure of finding someone who was worthy of your family and father, the life in the spotlight you didn’t want to have thrust upon anyone. The clout-chasers, the brownnosers, all of it has culminated in this, you, waiting to have sex with someone who means something to you. It’s a personal choice, one that hasn’t really bothered you, not until now.

“I mean, I’ve kissed people. I just haven’t… you know,” you clarify, feeling way too embarrassed to actually say it out loud.

“I’m, I’m so sorry, holy shit,” Jaehyun stutters, tripping over himself in his efforts to apologize. “If I knew, I wouldn’t have acted like that.”

That is a response from him you hadn’t predicted, his earnest and contrite face flickers right into your guarded heart. “It’s okay.”

“Get over here,” he directs, grasping your hand and pulling you over to where he is.

He sits on the railing by the front of the house, legs parted slightly in front of him, and he tucks you right into the space there, holding you in his arms as he smiles softly at you. Your liaison under the stairs had been dashed with the overtones of lust and want, but there’s none of that now as he admires you before him, fingers dancing through the hair in your ponytail before his hand settles warmly on your collarbone.

“You’re not what I thought,” he murmurs. “Not at all.”

The slight pressure of his hand on your shoulder brings you towards him, so he can kiss you once more. He’s a thousand times more careful now, a move that makes you want to both scream at him to not treat you like a porcelain doll, and press yourself into him tightly in gratitude for making you feel so cherished. His fingers slip under the strap of your dress, brushing over the arc of your chest as his tongue nudges yours, but he does it all with the affectations of a man possessed by your being, determined to treat you in a way that is so, so glorious.

You know what this is leading to. You’re not exactly sure what he means to you, but he certainly means something to you, he does.

“Hello?”

At the sound of someone’s voice, you lean back from Jaehyun, making it look like you’ve just been talking closely instead of kissing, “Exy?”

She’s looking in the opposite direction, so she’s actually missed all of that just now. Her face actually sags in relief to see you there,“Oh good, someone’s still here. I thought everyone left without me.”

It’s as if Exy’s just hit you over the head with an anvil, because you come back to reality from whatever planet of fantasy you’ve been in for the past hour. You’re here with Jaehyun, the son of the man who’s, for all intents and purposes, your father’s biggest rival. He’s not a clout-chaser nor a brownnoser, but he probably has the most fundamental strike against him that he can.

You could never bring him home in that way, not really. Johnny has broken up with girlfriends for way less, for details about their education and career aspirations that have mattered a hell a lot less than being the son of Jeffrey Jung. You’d get a disapproving stare from your father, maybe even a subtle lecture about the company you’re supposed to be keeping. That’s all he’d need to do before you’d have to forcibly carve Jaehyun out from your life.

Tonight has been cliché and magical and wonderful, but it can’t erase the two decades of hurt, the poisoned words and fights and shot-at targets. You know you’re speeding ahead far too fast, you’re just kissing outside of the SME house and he’s not proposed marriage or anything. But for his sake, and yours, you can’t let it get to that point.

“You two can take the uber,” you offer to Exy, who shrugs and nods at the suggestion.

“You’re not going to come?” Jaehyun looks physically stunned, like he can’t believe a word of what you’re saying. Like he’d expected to be sweeping you off your feet at any second now.

You shake your head, and it is the worst thing ever. “I need to study this weekend, anyways.”

He can’t even look at you then, the damage irreparable, his gaze locked on the ground as he puts an arm around Exy’s shoulder to head to the waiting car. You watch him get into the vehicle and speed away into the night with his proper, intended date. The clock strikes midnight, and you don’t get a pumpkin carriage to take you home.

You walk, slowly and alone.

**tbc.**

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> don't hate me! lol anyways, finally decided how many chapters i'm going to break this up into, some will def be longer than others, but it's around 80k right now before my edits. leave a comment if you'd like, i always try to respond to everyone :)


	4. loyalty

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> You love your brother unconditionally, your family too, and so you will do this for him.

The start of summer means the reappearance of Jaehyun, and it’s almost comical how uncannily similar this scenario is to one you’ve lived before.

The tropical heat is not the cool nautical air of the Hamptons, and you’re on beach chairs instead of wicker rocking chairs, but there’s something to be said about the way your nose crinkles with aversion when you see him.

“What is he doing here?”

Minnie looks past you, to where Jaehyun is standing with your brother and Mark, and she gripes, “You said I could bring someone, remember? Sadly, the tickets were booked before we ended things. I hate that I ended things because he seemed like he was pulling away. He looks _so good_ right now.”

“Oh my lord,” you sigh heavily, because there are _so_ many things wrong with his presence here at your house.

But you’re the villain this go around, you’re the one who’d technically done wrong at your last meeting, so you can’t really be upset at him.Seeing him in his loosely buttoned white linen shirt is enough to let you know how idiotic of a decision leaving the party alone had been, but there’s no take backs now.

Noticing your silence, Minnie taps you on the shoulder in concern, “Is there something wrong?”

“No, no, I’m just glad to see you,” you somewhat lie, because you are glad that she’s here. “I can’t believe this is the first time you’ve been to our house here.”

“We’re going to get so tan!” She squeals, enthralled by the idea of your luxurious vacation that awaits. “And maybe there’s hot boys over at the resort.”

“Maybe,” you mumble, and then your attention is captured by your father standing up with his glass of champagne.

He holds out a hand to you, and you run up from your seat to stand by him, hovering on your bare tiptoes to kiss his cheek after he’s handed you a matching glass of bubbly.

“Thank you, everyone, for being here tonight. I can’t believe we’re here again this quickly, I feel just as grateful now as I did two years ago,” your dad starts his speech in the same way, and it makes you feel like nothing’s changed. “This is a party for my family, yes, but I want to take a moment and congratulate everyone here who’s graduated. Minnie and Haechan, from Georgetown with honors. My second son Mark, from Harvard with honors.”

He raises his glass pointedly to each of your friends in their seats, and you hold your breath, waiting to see if he’ll grit his teeth and acknowledge Jaehyun. He’s right there in the back, standing in between his father and Stephanie, but your father passes him right over to turn back and present you to the crowd.

“But tonight is a night for my daughter, who graduated from Harvard summa cum laude. I am beyond proud of everything that she’s accomplished, and it is an extremely satisfying moment for me to watch a Suh go out into the world with their head held as high as hers. Thank you so much to all the families who flew out here just to celebrate. Have a wonderful night!”

“Wow, you got a whole monologue,” Johnny grumbles into your ear, though he’s not really mad. “I had to share my speech with you.”

You hug him tightly, and when he pulls back, there’s a sheen of tears covering his eyes.

“Mom would be proud of you,” he whispers, and then the tears are there in an instant for you, too. Is this what she expected? Is this what she would’ve wanted you to become?

“You think?”

He kisses your cheek. “I know.”

“I’m sorry Wendy couldn’t make it, I know it would’ve been nice to have her here,” you offer softly as you squeeze his hand. “Feels weird without her.”

Johnny’s lips purse, like he’s trying to decide what to say, but ends with, “It’s okay. Better for her to stay away from the Massachusetts elite, anyways.”

You chuckle at his quip, and then someone catches your eye, causing you to step away from your brother, “Hold on, I’ve gotta do something.”

You do feel appreciated and loved by your family, proud as well, but you can’t help but feel irked that your father hadn’t named Jaehyun during his remarks. Mr. Jung had gone out of his way multiple times to show his appreciation for both you and Johnny, and he could’ve been extended the same courtesy.

“Mr. Jung,” you address him politely once you see that he’s standing alone. “I am so sorry my father didn’t mention Jaehyun in his speech. I’m sure you’re very proud of him. Congratulations.”

You hold out your hand, the first gesture of goodwill you’ve willingly extended to him, and he looks totally surprised that you’ve approached him. Then, his face melts into a smile of fatherly appreciation, and he shakes your hand.

“Thank you, it’s nice to have a graduate to celebrate this time around,” he accepts, phrasing a little strange and maybe a little sad but he continues on. “But you are the one deserving of a congratulations. Welcome to our elite group of Harvard alumni, I think we all knew what a star you’d become. Are you heading to Capitol Hill?”

You shake your head. “No, that life is not for me. I’m weighing my options on what activist organizations to join, trying to capitalize on the celebrity my name affords me before the term’s up.”

You have the luxury of a home and income for the time being, you can wait to find the right fit and go from there. You can do a world of good for some groups by the pure brand power your last name provides, and you want to make sure you’re helping out the most deserving of them.

“If you’re interested in software, I’m sure we can make room for another Harvard grad,” he jokes with you.

“I don’t think dad would appreciate the poach, but thank you,” you navigate the contentious waters there with practiced ease, and he doesn’t seem the least bit affected by your return banter.

“You’re absolutely right,” Mr. Jung laughs, before he glances past you. “By the way, have you seen Stephanie?”

You turn your head but don’t see the Jung matriarch anywhere on the patio. “No, I haven’t. But I’ll let you know if I do.”

“Thanks,” he pats your shoulder lightly. “Congratulations again.”

You allow yourself just a second to contemplate what it’d be like to have him as a father-in-law. That sets off a cascade of very complicated feelings, of a very different way this party could’ve gone.

You’re about to sit and contemplate when a very crude joke spirals into your ear, “Summa my balls.”

“Hmm?” You look over to see who’s joined you by the bar, and here we go.

“Really had to rub it in all of our lowly faces that you graduated from Harvard as the top of the top?” Jaehyun teases you, that affable smile of his poised and ready to charm.

“Yeah.”

“You thinking about something?”

“My mom,” you breeze out in spite of your reservations. “How nice it would’ve been if she’d been here.”

Your mom would’ve been gracious enough to congratulate Jaehyun for graduating from Georgetown, summa cum laude as well, you’re sure. Maybe she’d be able to soften your dad, get him malleable and willing to accept an outsider into the family. Your memories of her are outlined in the eyes of childish idealism, but you have a feeling this is exactly how she’d be.

“You, you’ve never mentioned her. I don’t think I’ve ever heard you talk about her,” Jaehyun hums thoughtfully, then registers your lack of response. “For a reason, huh?”

“I mean, it’s just a time in my life that I don’t really like to talk about. Or think about, really. John and I were kids when she left, and no amount of child therapy can truly get rid of that _why me_ feeling,” you certainly didn’t expect to get deep into your lightly traumatic past with Jaehyun at your grad party, but here you are.

You’d been too young to remember all the details, but John does, and he has never spoken about it with you. There were a lot of arguments that you can recall, by a lot you mean endless fights that stretched out into infinity. Her suitcases strewn around the master bedroom, one last explosive altercation, her begging you for something, you clinging onto your father’s hand. A tearful hug, a kiss goodbye, and then nothing. That’s all you have.

“I just moved on, I have my dad and John, I guess,” you sigh, wistful and melancholy. “But I still would’ve liked to have her here. You can’t really judge me, though, can you?”

You’ve known him for close to a decade now, known his stepmom for that whole time as well, and still don’t know a single thing about his birth mother. You figure you should do a cursory Google search, because the information is probably out there, but even that feels incredibly invasive.

“No, I can’t,” he admits, the air between you turning somber.

You don’t want that, not when he’d approached you so easily, and you try to lighten the mood, “We shouldn’t be talking about this, not now, really. It is my night, and I would rather not be sad.”

He nods, and you feel like he’s about to leave you there, perhaps misinterpreting your request. You don’t want that either, so you end up blurting, “You know what? I never figured out which of the fantasies was yours, during that game.”

Why, y/n? Why that? Why, why, why?

That piques his interest, and he leans back against the marble column to his right, mouth twisting as he asks, “You really want to know?”

You shrug, trying to come across as nonchalant, “I mean, you know what mine was.”

“Hold up,” he mutters, rifling through the pocket of his ivory jeans to pull out his wallet. He rifles through the bills tucked into the wide pocket, then produces a small, white strip of paper.

“What’s this?” You eye it curiously as he drops it into your hand, then your face lights up in recognition. “You kept it?”

His smile turns downright devilish as he reveals, “I wrote two, and put the fake one in.”

You peek at the small bit of writing that you can make out, _My fantasy is_ …, and you realize that you’ve seen the immaculate script before.

“Wait, wait. I recognize your handwriting,” you close your eyes, trying to picture the same lettering on a different slip of paper. Then your eyes blow wide open. “You put the Bill Clinton one in yourself, and you picked it out?”

That means he’d known that he’d gotten his own fantasy after picking it out of the hat, but he’d kissed you all the same. And his low voice echoes your thought, “I told you, I would’ve kissed you no matter what the paper said. After all, I came up all the way to Boston hoping to catch a glimpse of you that weekend.”

You’re harpooned with bashfulness at the true reason why he’d shown up at that formal party, chin tucking into your neck as you shyly mumble, “Cocky bastard.”

Perhaps the damage hadn’t been irreparable. You’re about to unfurl the page, to read what Jaehyun had actually written down as his fantasy, when you spot someone walking out of the house.

“Oh, Stephanie,” you call, and she wobbles in her heels as she turns in surprise. You point out her husband across the way, “Mr. Jung was looking for you.”

She wipes at the corner of her smudged lipstick, then smiles at the two of you together, “Thanks, y/n. Congratulations! I’ll find you later.”

But she’s otherwise distracted and totally misses the approaching waiter as she’s answering you. A pitcher of sangria goes spilling down the front of her dress when she collides right into him. She gasps in surprise at the surely frigid sensation, “Oh, shit. Oh no!”

Your father rushes out of the house at the sound of the commotion, running up to the woman in concern, “Stephanie, you okay?”

You immediately jog inside the villa through the door your dad just came from, and Jaehyun calls after you as he trails behind, “Where are you going?”

“To find a sweater for your stepmom,” you call back without turning as you ascend the stairs to the floor where your room is.

Her clothes are probably at the hotel where she’s staying, you don’t want her to be wet and uncomfortable while she’s still here at the house. You rummage around your closet until you find a sweater in a similar shade of blue to the dress Stephanie is wearing, and when you turn to leave again, you nearly scream in surprise when you see Jaehyun standing by your door.

“Did you follow me into my room?” You hiss, hoping that no one’s wandered up here with you. “What are you doing?”

He’s pushing the door shut, the lock snapping into place with a foreboding click, and then his face falls when he turns to see the garment clutched in your hands.

“Oh, you literally meant find a sweater.”

Your forehead furrows in confusion. “Yes?”

His hands disappear into the sleeves of his shirt, cheeks turning red in bashfulness as he asks, “Did you read the paper?”

“Huh? Oh, no.”

Lost in the commotion of the past five minutes had been his archived fantasy, and the little slip is still crushed in between your fingers.

“Read it,” Jaehyun insists.

You unfold the paper completely, eyes focusing on his neat handwriting amidst the creases, and you begin by reciting what you’d seen earlier, “My fantasy is…”

The sweater in your hand falls to the floor when you find the need to steady out the shaking paper with both sets of fingers. Because the end of that sentence goes like this,

_to kiss Governor Suh’s pretty daughter._

“Jaehyun,” you whisper.

He whispers back, “Y/n.”

“Ah,” you chuckle nervously, because he’s here in your room, and the door is closed and he looks so beautiful in the sparkling tropical moon’s rays. “At least you got to cross your fantasy off the list that night. I’m sure no one else was as lucky.”

“Turn it over,” he tells you, and you do, hypnotized by him as you are.

 _Again,_ has been hastily scrawled into the middle of the backside of the paper. Which amends the sentence into something else entirely.

_My fantasy is to kiss Governor Suh’s pretty daughter. Again._

You can do this. It’s just the two of you in this room, there’s no bodyguard or chaperone or familial obligations. You’ll never have to bring him home, no one will have to know. You can do this, you can, but it’s more than that. You want to.

So, you kiss him right in the middle of your bedroom.

It’s so much easier this way, not trying to fight any of who you are, just becoming whoever you are when you’re with him. He steps back a little in surprise once your lips come into contact with his, but he gets the hang of it, hands flying to hold you around the waist as he tilts his head to receive your affection.

He’s fully committed now, skirt of your dress bunching up under his strong grasp, his mouth moving from your lips to the slant of your jaw, a fond constellation of his true feeling for you marked onto the skin there. His mouth is everywhere after that, your cheeks to your lips to the hollow of your neck, to the steel of your sternum. You’re totally out of your depth, you’re not entirely sure what you should be doing besides standing there and letting him have you, and he picks up on your apprehension.

“Hold up. It’s okay, sweetheart,” Jaehyun breathes out the delightful nickname, then gently tosses you back onto the bed.

You land with a flourish in the middle of the duvet, and from here you can see that his shirt is all askew on his frame. You’re about to point it out when he just undoes the remaining buttons and tosses it aside, climbing onto the bed to hover over where you are. His fingers glide over the delicate area where your ear, jaw, and neck all share one border, and his lips nestle their way into that sweet little spot.

With him above you like this, you finally can see his tattoo in full, eight delicate petals fanning out in the outline of a tiny flower by the end of his collarbone, and you lift up and gently press your lips to it. His hand is on your thigh now, under the skirt of your dress, and if he moves it all the way up, he’d be able to take your dress off in one go. But he won’t have to exert the effort, because you reach down and peel the garment off yourself.

You must be the dictionary definition of intoxicating and alluring all wrapped up into one nervous girl. Because Jaehyun’s mouth has fallen open at the expanse of your exposed skin, the delicate lace of your bra that had been hiding under your clothes, how your hair fans out around you on the silk pillowcase, how your breath is hitched with desire and apprehension.

He must know you better than any single person who’s ever known you because he holds your face, eyes waltzing their way across the depth of you, and he whispers, “You okay with this?”

You don’t take more than a second to answer, “Yeah,” because you are.

Then Jaehyun, sweet Jaehyun, kisses you again, like he’d made his desires known at the beginning of the night. His hand is on yours, and so is his heart, and you’re crossing your fantasy completely off the list in one devastatingly enchanting fell swoop.

Because he, this, you together here in your bed, it all means something to you.

He is so gentle with you, so, so tender in a way you couldn’t even imagine, that it doesn’t even feel like you’re doing the most terrifying and exhilarating thing you’ve ever done with your life. It feels right, even though you accidentally knock heads with him and he falls on top of you by accident when he slips on the comforter. It’s like you’re meant to be here, right here and right now, just the two of you and and the way all of him curves onto all of you. You fall asleep after tucked into the crook of his arm, a decrescendo of devotion putting the perfect finishing touches onto the soundtrack for a night of shared slumber.

You jolt awake in the morning with a rather inelegant snore, and you almost twitch again when you realize that your bed is not unoccupied. But none of it is bad.

“Two for two on fantasies, huh?” Jaehyun is awake and already sleepily pestering you, hair falling into his eyes as he rolls over to kiss you on the cheek.

“Cocky….” You mutter, but your chest is flooding with sunniness.

“You didn’t seem to mind,” he grabs at you under the covers and you laugh and try to scoot away. “Certainly less than frigid.”

“Go back to sleep, idiot,” you shove a pillow into his face as you put on a set of pajamas from your bedside drawer and fix the abomination that’s your hair. “Try not to look too obvious when you come downstairs.”

The sound of the pillow thudding into the door as he throws it at you is a direct parallel of the way your heart thuds in your chest with delight. Jaehyun, Jaehyun. Whatever are you going to do with him? Keep him around, you hope.

You saunter into the kitchen lazily, your entire mood brimming with pure happiness that you nearly choke on when you see who’s pouring himself a glass of water in your villa’s kitchen.

“Matthew? What are you doing here?”

“Y/n. Good morning,” he addresses you with a flirtatious little smile

The tall man is in a suit, though it’s slightly wrinkled as if he’s just gotten off a long flight, but you’re not entirely sure you’re wrapping your head around the fact that Matthew is in your Turks house’s kitchen. You hadn’t really seen him much after you blew him off at the formal, only a few light conversations on campus and a perfunctory goodbye at graduation.

“What are you doing here?” You ask again when he doesn’t answer.

Your father emerges from outside, in his golf clothes and Patriots cap, and he slaps hands with Matthew before explaining, “I invited him.”

“You, you what?” You stutter, totally confused as to what’s going on here.

“Matthew, come out to the lawn with us. Your old man’s been waiting,” your dad guides your classmate away, before he turns back to you. “I’ll be right there for breakfast.”

You crane your neck to see what’s going on, all you can make out is a congregation of men out by the pool. Matthew’s dad and a few other board members are here.

“You disappeared last night,” Mark points out as he collapses onto a barstool next to you.

You nudge him, tilting your head in the direction of the bizarre gathering, “Mark, this is fucking weird, no?”

The two of you sleuth for a few seconds more, and then he shrugs as he pours his cereal, “I guess all the S&L senior partners are here. Henry was on the flight with me and dad.”

“Dad still has a few months left before his term as governor ends, I didn’t think they’d look into the takeover yet,” you muse as you snatch the box from him. Johnny hadn’t mentioned anything about being approached for the transition yet.

“Maybe they’re just here to jerk each other off like they always do,” Mark jibes, but then he fixes you with a very curious look. “But seriously, where’d you go?”

Had he heard any of that last night? His usual room is down the hall, Johnny’s room, Minnie’s room, and two guest bedrooms away. You don’t think you were…. _that_ loud.

“You know I hate things like this. I spent the whole night in my room,” you fib, spinning a believable falsehood that even your closest friend will eat up. You turn the tables on him, too. “You’re telling me you and Chan didn’t lock yourselves away?”

Mark splutters over his spoonful of milk. “W-what?”

You busy yourself with picking out the marshmallows in the Lucky Charms, totally missing the way Mark reacts. “Like, you guys hate schmoozing as much as me. Thought you’d watch Fast and Furious or something.”

“Ah, yeah,” he mutters. “That’s what we did.”

“Hey,” a hoarse voice cuts into you, and you look up oh, so casually.

You thank yourself immediately for taking the slow route, because if you had looked up right away you’ve would’ve gotten a nosebleed. Jaehyun is there in the kitchen, wearing nothing but a pair of sweatpants you know he stole from the depths of your closet, glistening alabaster all of him taking up the sensory depth of your perception. He grins at you, then heads to pluck a bowl out of the dishwasher.

“Hey,” you reply neutrally, though the way your lips press together as you try to fight a smile must give you away completely.

“Yo Jae,” Mark greets his friend without a trace of suspicion. “You slept over?”

“Crashed in a random bedroom, no idea,” Jaehyun fabricates the tale as he sits at the stool right next to you, letting his thigh press right against yours. “I’ll head back to the hotel soon.”

The moment Jaehyun’s free hand comes to rest on your bare knee, Minnie flies into the kitchen, gaze fluttering all over the place. She practically seizes in terror when she sees Jaehyun still in your house, but she marches right up to him, determined look settling onto her face.

“Hey, you slept over?” Her mouth is going a mile a minute. “Can we talk? I was up all night thinking, and I’m sorry.”

“Oh?”

Before any of you so much as move a muscle, Minnie leans over and full on kisses Jaehyun on the mouth, then pleads quietly, “I want to get back together.”

His hand slips off your knee, and the smile slips off your face. You honestly don’t know what the fuck he says next, because you shake the cereal box particularly violently into your bowl.

It’s fine, it’s really fine. You two had just slept together, you’d made no vows or commitments or really done any sort of talking about what had gone on. If he wants to get back with Minnie, that’s his prerogative. You’re not the boss of him, apparently. And you’re definitely not upset.

“Pass the milk.”

“That’s interesting,” Mark hums, totally entranced at watching the scene unfold.

“Pass the milk!” You say just a tad too sharply, then you soften. “Please, Marky.”

He does, and once your cereal bowl is done to your liking, you tug him out of the kitchen, to afford your friend and your…. something... the privacy they deserve. Once you come back in with Mark and Matthew at the turn of the hour, they’re not arguing, nor are they kissing, but you don’t have the heart to ask.

Minnie doesn’t tell, only glowers, and Jaehyun doesn’t, either. He eyes your dad, towering by your side, and keeps his mouth closed.

—

The trip passes in this blur of confusion that you remain in once Jaehyun leaves the following night without a word. But you don’t get even a moment of emotional rest once you return home from the Turks a week later, because one little news report tornadoes its way right through your unstably stable life.

“Breaking news, we’re hearing word from the governor’s camp that he plans to step down early, intending to focus on a presidential bid for next year.”

The glass you’d been carrying goes skittering to the floor, shattering into a hailstorm of shards, and Mark curses out loud, “What the fuck….”

Your trembling hands reach for the remote, turning your TV to the absolute maximum volume it’s capable, needing to make sure you hear all of this loudly and clearly.

“Governor Suh is expected to announce his plans tonight at a dinner with the shareholders of his company, S&L. Rumors have been swirling about a possible plan of succession, as CEO Eugene Lee’s temporary tenure was only planned to last the length of Suh’s term. That position could become permanent for him, but hints have also pointed to both Henry Lau, current CFO, and John Suh, the governor’s son.”

A presidential bid? What, and you cannot stress this enough, the fuck.

“Did you know?” Mark marvels out loud, and you’re not sure your heart rate will ever be a normal pace again.

“Literally nothing. Radio silence. You?”

“Nada,” Mark shakes his head in confirmation. “That must be why the S&L board came to the Turks.”

“I can’t believe he would decide to do this without asking me or Johnn—,” you start to gripe, then your phone goes off with a call from the exact person you need to talk to.

“Hey.”

“Hey,” Johnny sounds as shell-shocked as you are. “Are you watching the news?”

“Yeah, did you know?”

“No. But can you come over? It’s really important,” his audible terror curls into your ear, and you know your brother well enough to know that something’s pretty terribly wrong.

You race out of the house in your Adidas slides, sprinting all the way down the two blocks to where Johnny’s rented apartment is. Thank god he’d decided to come home first before going back to D.C. You let yourself into his place, and no sooner than you’ve sat down on his bed when the words come darting out of your brother’s mouth, “I can’t.”

“You can’t what?” You ask as he takes off his hat and tosses it onto the chair beside him. He drops onto the bed beside you and flops his face into his silk sheets, letting out a long, pained groan.

“I can’t take over S&L.”

Even you’d both been caught off guard by the presidential bid surprise, Johnny had to have known he would be asked to take over soon. None of the other rumors were true besides the one about him, you yourself had already started emotionally preparing for your brother stepping into your father’s vacated role.

He has always been so confident, so smart and well-spoken and polite and righteous that you imagined he would easily step into the CEO role at S&L when the time came for Mr. Lee to resume his regular duties.

But as he looks up at you from where his head is buried in the bedspread, it’s obvious that Johnny isn’t ready at all. He’s never worked a day at the company, like you have, and he studied political theory in school.He’s come out of his education as a campaign manager, not a company leader. Though you suppose it doesn’t really matter what degree he has, since the role would be conferred upon him regardless.The weed scandal hadn’t even materialized into the media, a worry that feels like it haunted you a lifetime ago, so what is it?

You’re not really sure how to broach the subject gently but you have to try, and so you lay a comforting hand on his back,

“John, I know you don’t feel ready, but papa and I are going to be with you through it all. You’ll have us, and Mr. Lee, there’s no way any of us are going to let you go into this blind. I’m sure you’ll be great.”

He moans again, “I can’t.”

Okay, now you are starting to get irritated at his unwillingness to explain, “I don’t know why you can’t spit it out, but you’re testing me and I don’t want that. Why can’t you? You’ve known this was your future since dad stepped down to assume the governorship.”

“I’m in love with Wendy.” He whispers the next words so quietly you’re unsure if you hear correctly, “and she’s pregnant.”

“Excuse me, what?”

“She’s pregnant,” he repeats and can’t quite look you in the eye while he does so. “A few months now. She couldn’t fly to the Turks because her morning sickness was so bad.”

Your excitement for your brother and his girlfriend is soured by the complete confusion you feel. “I, I just don’t understand. Papa has met Wendy. I’d say he even likes her.”

There’s no reason for your brother’s relationship status to affect his career, but his jaw drops in surprise, “Wait, you actually don’t know?”

“Know what?”

“I’ve known that dad has an expected an arranged marriage from me since I was, oh I don’t know, like ten.”

Your heart stills completely. Oh, no.

“That’s part of the reason why mom left, she wanted us to be free to live our own lives. She fought so hard to get him to let go of that, and he just wouldn’t. But I’ve always prepared myself for it, saw it as a responsibility, something I owed to him to see through. This isn’t Game of Thrones, but these sort of alliances do still help.”

You literally cannot believe what you’re hearing. An arranged marriage? How archaic is your father really? And to hear that your mom… that was a reason why she had fled from your family. She’d been that upset by the idea she’d divorced your father and disappeared? You’re beyond overwhelmed, how had you been in the dark about this all these years?

Johnny is too good, too honorable, it is true and undeniable. Any other day before this, you would’ve expected him to follow his familial duty in becoming CEO and building a bridge through some other company head’s daughter.

But now that there is a child in the mix, you know exactly why he cannot do his duty. 

It is exactly because Johnny is too good and too honorable. He will never leave Wendy and his baby behind forever to marry someone else, he’ll do the right thing. You know he’s agonized over it, there’s no way he had gone a single day without recognizing the very real possibility that his girlfriend could be an innocent casualty in all of this.

“Johnny,” you grab his hands, trying a last-ditch attempt to convince him to not do what you think he’s going to do. “If you decide not step in, is papa okay with Mark’s dad taking over completely? I assume there’s no way he’s letting Henry Lau get his hands on S&L.”

“y/n,” he sits up then and climbs out of the bed, kneeling on the floor before you. “The company can still stay in the family.”

No. There is no way he’s going to do this. This is not what you had been born for, you were planning to fade away into a storied career in education outreach. Maybe aspiring to the Department of Education if you were really going for it. You hadn’t been the one preparing for this, it’s not you, it can’t be you.

You love your brother unconditionally, but you kind of hate him right now as his predictable words come out,

“I’ve watched you grow up out of dad’s shadow, you’re way more than what I was at your age. You’re much smarter and more politically savvy than me. You’re beautiful, you’re kind, but most importantly, you’ve already worked there. You’d make an even better CEO than I would.”

Johnny starts to cry then, and the hatred in you is gone. He’s never cried in front of you before, not when the Patriots lost to the Eagles, or when he didn’t get into Harvard, or even when your mother left, but you can see how broken he is, how desperate and confused and hopeless he feels right now. He has protected you your whole life, has encouraged your dreams and been both your third parent and your best friend. You think about how happy he’ll be for the rest of his life, with Wendy and their pretty baby, and you decide.

You love your brother unconditionally, your family too, and so you will do this for him. You fold your hands solemnly in your lap and let out a breath, “If you want this, you must ask me.”

Bowing his head deeply, and then looking right into your eyes with his own, Johnny utters the words that change everything, “Will you take over S&L for me?”

You grab his hand, your wonderful older brother’s protective hand, and you seal your fate, “I will.”

But there’s not one heartbeat of a break for the relief to come, because all of this feels so incredibly wrong and you know you both are not off the hook.

You grab his shoulders and shake him a little. “Okay, you listen to me now. If what you’re saying is true, then papa will not be happy.”

“I know,” Johnny sighs forlornly. “I don’t know how I’m going to go to the party tonight and say it to his face.”

The father you know shouldn’t be upset at the prospect of his son falling in love and having a child. But you don’t know this version of him, the one with blockbuster presidential ambition,s made without consulting you, and forced arranged marriages, and all these plots and schemes. You have to do more for Johnny than just this.

“No, no, don’t do that.”

“No?”

“I will go by myself,” you promise. “But you need to do something for me.”

Johnny nods, and then you instruct him, “Take Wendy, go to City Hall right now. Get married.”

“What?”

You can picture the scene like it’s one of those 1920s gangster movies you and Mark used to watch in history class. Johnny showing up at the dinner tonight to a band of thugs that forces him into a wedding. That’s not exactly what’s happening here, but you can’t run that risk.

“You’re having a baby, I’m sure you’re planning on getting married for real anyways. Go there, get married, and that way there’s no possible way for papa to force you to get divorced without dragging you into a legal process.”

Now that you’ve planted the seed, Johnny is surely envisioning the exact same scenario, and he flies out of bed in an instant, “Yes, yes, I’ll go now.”

“You better clear your night, though,” you point out as you hand him his cap. “Dad will want to see us after the dinner for sure.”

“I’ll come over to your house as soon as I’m done at City Hall,” he swears, and then he wraps you up into a hug. “Thank you. I love you so much, corn pop.”

He doesn’t need to thank you, because you’d do this for him a thousand times over. There’s no way your father will agree to this, but if you force his hand he’ll have to back down. You’ll need to go balls to the wall to pull this off.

—

Johnny runs to the basement to retrieve Wendy from the laundry room and you beeline straight back to your house, almost barreling right into Mark, who’s still got the TV turned to the news.

“I’m about to do something stupid, please stop me,” you babble, hoping to gather a modicum of comfort from him.

“Go for it,” he encourages you, though you’re pretty sure he doesn’t know what you’ve actually said, as distracted as he is by the picture of his father on the screen.

But Mark would approve of what you’re doing, so you leave him be.

You can’t take your time getting ready, the dinner is due to start any minute now, so you first fire a text to Lisa, then just throw on the first suit you see, a powerful number in white. You twist your hair up into a severe chignon that makes you look way older than you are, and just put enough smoky makeup on that you’ll look alluring on TV.

You pray that your stomach will allow you to survive the night without expelling itself onto the floor, then you dash out of the house. The party is already in full swing at the Prudential Center when you arrive by taxi, and you have to lay low so that no one alerts your father to your presence.

But perhaps you should’ve worn a less noticeable color, because someone calls your name almost immediately upon your entrance. You’ve half a mind to ignore it, because your dad is already on the podium speaking, but then you see Jaehyun there in his formal black suit and bow tie.

“Hey, we have to talk,” he crowds into your personal space right away, and you can’t take the onslaught of his familiar scent. Why are the two of you always like this, running and hiding and reemerging at the worst possible moments?

“Me first, because I don’t have a lot of time.” You hold out your hand to stop his approach. You fold your arms in front of you, then you drone out, “I will be taking over the duties as CEO of S&L in the upcoming weeks.”

You say it as objectively as you possibly can, even after his jaw drops in shock, trying not inject any sort of ulterior emotion, because you need to be able to keep it together with what you’re about to do.

“My father has asked me to do this instead of John, and we will be announcing it tonight. I thought since we are cordial with each other, that I’d at least inform you in person first. You’re here, so your father must also be in attendance, but it would be great if you could inform him personally as well. I will take over the day-to-day tasks of running the enterprise and will also have to enter into an arranged marriage as is expected of me.”

The last part is a wholly unnecessary bit to add in, but you’re almost completely convinced that he’d been itching to talk about what had gone down in the Turks. He probably doesn’t know this kind of thing still goes on, but he has to now, because the Turks can’t be discussed between the two of you, ever again. You both know exactly what kind of stipulations your arranged marriage will entail. That’s probably why Matthew had shown up at the villa, part of a deal his father had made with yours.

“Y/n, I—,” Jaehyun searches for the willpower to say what he wants to say, then settles for, “Congratulations.’

It’s a platitude you absolutely don’t want to accept, but you have to anyways. You’ll have to accept them from everyone.

“Thank you. I’m sorry.”

You really wish you could say more, but your father is approaching the climax of his speech and you can’t ruin all of your carefully laid plans from the past half an hour. Not even for him.

All you do is kiss Jaehyun on the cheek softly, and then run into the convention center. Once you’re inside, you hover tightly to the wall so that you don’t draw any attention as you make your way to the front.

“Well, I’m sure that you all heard the big announcement today, and I want to confirm again that yes, I am officially declaring myself a candidate for next year’s presidential election,” your father booms into the microphone, and the whole room bursts into thunderous applause.

You see Lisa across the stage from you, and she nods once you catch her eye. Everything is set, and it’s go time.

“But that’s not why you’re all here, is it? So I will cut right to the chase. I’m very pleased to announce that S&L will be passing on to the very capable hands of…” he turns to gesture to the screen, which is supposed to be flashing with a photo of Johnny, but it clicks forward to your stunning headshot instead. To your father’s credit, he does not flinch, only finishes with a smooth, “my daughter, y/n.”

There is a compounded moment of total silence, then the table in the front starts clapping, and another, and soon there’s a muted round of tentative applause for you. You know everyone is shocked, no one more so than your father. But he’d fallen right into your trap and hadn’t protested your abrupt change.

You stride onto the platform, Suh head held high like he taught you, and you accept your dad’s handshake, not even wincing a little when you feel the angry way he crushes your fingers.

“Y/n, congratulations.”

“Thank you.”

“Would you like to say something?”

You’d expected this, for him to put you on the spot and watch you fumble so he can brush you off as a struggling interloper, or worse, a drunk. But you are far, far more equal competitor at this game than he thinks you are.

“I will allow our esteemed governor to get back to his speech in a second,” you joke charmingly into the microphone, earning you a generous helping of chuckles. “But I just wanted to take a moment and thank you all for your continued support. I am so grateful for the lovely way I’ve always been treated during my time at the company, and I cannot wait to see where we will all go from here. Our family, us plus you, will stand stronger than ever now. Thank you!”

It’s short and sweet, to the point, and it makes all of the hotshots in the audience feel like they’re a cherished part of your family business. It’s sweet talking, manipulative to the max, but that’s all you need. The applause is belligerent now, even more so than it had been for your father earlier.

With a flirty wave, you go off the stage in the direction that Lisa’s standing, waiting to escort you out through the crush of reporters that immediately surrounds you. Your father is still speaking, the announcement coming at the apex of his speech with the concluding points still to go, and that gives you the perfect cover to escape without a public explosion. The governor is going to have to improvise the shit out of this speech closing, that's for damn sure.

You had been on stage for one minute thirty seconds, the exact amount of time it took you to drop a nuclear bomb on the Suh family.

—

You call a nondescript Uber once you’ve lost the reporters and escaped out a service entrance. The car drops Lisa off at her apartment first, you filling her ear and bank account with your immense gratitude, then you’re dropped off at your safe haven of a townhouse.

You’re not even a foot in the door before your best friend is hollering, “When you said you were doing something stupid, I didn’t know you meant that. What the fuck have you done?”

That means you’re on the news. Already.

“Wendy’s pregnant,” you reveal, and Mark comes skidding to a halt in the middle of the entryway.

“Oh,” he breathes out, and the devastation is written all over his face.

You hadn’t given him any details besides the baby announcement, and he is way too upset for just that. “You know? About the arranged marriage thing?”

“Yeah,” his breath catches in the back of his throat, severe grief lining the crease in his forehead in a way you’ve never seen before. “Because my dad expects that from me, too.”

You are completely heartbroken. What the fuck is going on in your life that you’ve gotten to this point, that sweet Mark is here confessing to you that he probably won’t be able to be with anyone he really loves. And you can’t save him like you’re saving Johnny.

“Holy fuck,” you choke. “Marky, I had no idea.”

Mark’s face crumples in distress, his voice breaking as he shuffles his feet, “You’re the bravest person on this goddamn planet to willingly agree to that.”

“We’re here, we’re here!” A duo of jovial voices ring out from your front door, interrupting your shared moment of mourning, and there Johnny and Wendy are, holding hands even as they take off their shoes.

“And?”

Wendy sticks out her left hand, a tiny little silver ring on her fourth finger, and you exhale thickly.

“You better go home, Mrs. Suh,” you air kiss Wendy on the cheek, squeezing her hand in a quiet congratulations. “You don’t want to be here when your father-in-law arrives.”

She looks to Johnny for approval, and he nods grimly. “You should. Love you.”

He kisses his wife, then pats her belly softly, and after she leaves your house you can see her from your bay window, walking up the sidewalk. Their apartment complex is just two blocks up, you’d ran it twice earlier this evening, so the three of you watch until she’s safely inside the building, and then you all collapse onto the couch.

Your face is on the TV screen, with your larger headshot in the background, and Johnny whistles lowly, “You’re a genius, how’d you get the presentation changed that quickly?”

“It helps to be nice to corporate nobodies,” you grunt, wishing you had a beer in hand. “That and a shit ton of money.”

You’re not entirely sure if Lisa will be fired before you assume enough power to save her job, so you’d given her a hard chunk of cash to get everything primed up for you. Small price to pay, really.

“Thanks,” he whispers, pressing a kiss to the side of your head.

The front door blasts open, and it’s time.

“Y/n! John!” Your father’s bellow thunders, dangerous and apocalyptic, and Johnny glances at you in concern.

“You ready?”

You look at him, then at Mark, who grabs your hand, and you gasp, “No.”

“Alright,” John stands up, assuming the big brother role once more. “Let me go first.”

Your father is red-faced in fury once he comes across you all in the living room, vein popping in his forehead, neck corded with aggravation. He does not move a muscle when Mark shifts nervously behind you upon seeing his father, and does not blink an eye when Johnny kneels before him.

“Father, I need to apologize and ask for your forgiveness. From tonight, I will not aspire to become CEO of S&L, and will defer my position to y/n.”

“How fucking dare you do this to me?” He spits in a rage. “Is this some kind of joke to you?”

You’ve never seen your father this mad, not ever, but then again, you and Johnny had never done something to this level before.

“Absolutely not, papa,” you challenge him, making your way to the front of the couch with your hands on your hips. “The family business is not a joke.”

He runs a frustrated hand through his hair. “Then why would you publicly embarrass me like that?”

“Did anyone know? That you intended to announce John?” You question him, so curious if he’d been embarrassed to be outed as a liar, or to be outsmarted by his kids. “Did they?”

You know tonight was just supposed to be an informal announcement, there’d probably been nomedia prepared or press releases sent out.

You can almost hear the way his teeth grind in his mouth when he bites out, “No.”

“Then what is the issue?”You ask, just as the TV blares particularly loudly.

“Surprise reports out of the Prudential Center tonight seem to indicate that Governor Suh has indicated his daughter, y/n, will be be taking on the CEO role at S&L at the turn of the summer. Ms. Suh is his second child, after eldest son John, and is a recent political science graduate from Harvard College.”

The reporter cuts away to a man that’s being interviewed outside of the Prudential Center, and he shrugs, “I’m just not sure that this was the right move for the governor to make. She’s like twenty-two or something.”

“That,” your dad says exasperatedly. “That is the issue.”

You wave your hand in the air. “The media is fickle, I guarantee it’ll only take until tomorrow until they’re praising it as a genius move.”

As if you’ve conjured it up yourself, there’s a different person getting interviewed, and she looks delighted. “I like it, I think it takes a lot of gumption to install a new dog in a position like that.”

You’ve thrown together your closing argument like you’re in a courthouse pleading for your life, “There’s no difference between John and me. We both lack the business experience and studied all the wrong things in college. But that doesn’t matter to you, because you would’ve told us otherwise when we picked our majors. He’s older than me, but I’ve worked at S&L before. I know what the company’s like.”

It’s all true and undeniable, and your father rubs at his eyes with his fingers as he mutters, “That doesn’t explain why you are allowing your sister to do this to you, John.”

Johnny coughs, surprised by the notion that your father thinks you’ve orchestrated this somehow. Then your father looks at Johnny’s sad face, and his eyes widen.

“It’s that girl.”

You step in front of a still kowtowing John, blocking your father’s path to him. You growl,“That girl doesn’t matter.”

He tries to blow by you and you put your arms up to his chest, pushing him away from your brother as best as you can.

“No, no. Papa, the girl doesn’t matter. She doesn’t. You have me now. I’ll be your mouthpiece, your puppet, whatever. I’ll get married, I’ll do what you want. But leave John be,” you plead desperately, because you’re still his little girl, you can still get to him in this way. But your father looks unconvinced, and you prepare yourself to plunge the dagger in. “For the sake of your unborn grandchild and daughter-in-law, let him be.”

Mr. Lee audibly gasps as the color drains out of your father’s face at the truth. Now he knows that Johnny has a wife and a baby on the way, that no amount of yelling he can do will change it.

His tone quiets, but it is just as stern and hard as ever when he addresses Johnny, “I will ask you once and only once to confirm, are you sure this is what you want?”

Your brother looks at you from where he’s kneeling and you give him a subtle nod, reaffirming your earlier commitment.

“This is what I want, father. I beg you to allow me to do this.”

Your dad, though he’s not your dad right now, not really, turns to you and coldly asks, “This is what you want as well?”

You nod, sealing your fate, and then bow deeply in reverence, “Yes, this is what I want.”

“y/n is still a child!” Mr. Lee exclaims, pushing at your father’s shoulder from his right side. “She cannot do this! We talked about this, it was supposed to be John!”

“Quiet, Eugene.”

You are not surprised that Mark’s dad is somehow in on this. You don’t know the adults in your life anymore, you want your mom here, you want to hug her and disappear and not deal with any of this forever. But you brush that aside, the full force of your vigilant watch over Johnny roaring out.

“I will do it,” you say commandingly and you can see them all look at you in surprise at your tenacity. “I am sure I will succeed.”

Your father dismisses your statement with a careless wave of his hand, “Even if your convictions weren’t this strong, you would have no choice. There is no turning back now.”

You think that it’s finally over, because he has finally gone silent with acceptance, and then he twists his own knife in, “I will contact Senator Lau to begin negotiating your dowry.”

Your heart may as well have fallen into the crevices of your tiny, tiny ankle bones.

You muster a faint, “What?”

“Of course,” he nods, haughty and triumphant once more. “Your engagement to Henry will be announced at the end of the month.”

When you both can’t find anything else to say, he tips his head in victory first to John, then to you, “Good night, children.”

“Come along, Minhyung,” Mr. Lee demands, and Mark shuffles over to him, giving you the saddest, most apologetic look from behind his dad’s back as he follows the two men out of your house.

The front door blasts closed, and it’s over.

“Oh, corn pop," Johnny sighs. "I'm so sorry..”

Your brother envelops you into a hug as you realize just what particular brand of horror awaits you.

**tbc.**

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> THE DRAMA BEGINS. THIS IS A WARNING!


	5. discovery

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Your fingers run over the image of your little face, and you hope that you can get back to this point, that you’ll show this to your dad and it’ll all go back to how it should be.

A glass of vodka slides across the bar to you, and the bartender’s sympathetic voice rings into your ear, “Tough day?”

You down the straight shot in one go, and groan, “No idea."

You look up at the handsome man, an employee you don’t recognize, though he clearly recognizes you, “You’re Governor Suh’s daughter, I mean CEO Suh, right? You’ve been all over the news.”

“Guilty, actually, today was my first day as CEO Suh,” you reply, already feeling the pleasant warmth of the vodka tempering your foul mood.

He pushes another glass to you over the bar, filled with twice as much liquid, then offers sympathetically, “On the house.”

“Thanks…” you squint at the name tag he’s wearing, but can’t make it out in the dark lighting.

“Ten.”

“Love it,” you raise your glass to him in appreciation. “Thanks, Ten.”

“You need to talk about it or?”

“Let me get a few drinks in and then I’m sure I’ll be blabbing your ear off,” you sarcastically bite out, draining the rest of the double and letting him pour you another.“You start here recently?”

Neo City has been your dad’s go-to restaurant for some time now, you know all the managers and servers, but you’ve never seen Ten around here before.

He nods. “Yeah. You noticed?”

“Sort of a family hot spot, I’ve been coming here for years.”

Once the three shots have fully settled into your belly, the words are already tumbling out of your mouth, “Holy shit men are so toxic, though. I could barely get a word in at my first board meeting.”

Ten laughs, your insult at his gender rolling off his shoulders, and you take that as a sign to go on,“It was actually supposed to be my brother, eh? But I took over the role for him so he wouldn’t have to leave his pregnant girlfriend for an arranged marriage.”

Johnny had been blessedly left out of the media whirlwind you and your father had been on in the past week. Knowing he and Wendy had a small degree of peace this way is enough for you.

“Oh wow,” Ten breathes out in surprise at your revelation, and you probably shouldn’t have let that slip to a random person but you’re too far in now.

Like, you’re well and truly ranting, unable to control the information spewing from your mouth as the volcano of you approaches eruption, “Like holy fuck. My classmates at Harvard are out backpacking in Europe or whatever college grads do, while I’m stuck here corralling white collar losers and contemplating which Vera Wang dress I want to wear while walking down the aisle.

The only thing I ever did for the company before was give out scholarships to kids. That’s what I was going to do after school.I have no idea what the fuck I’m doing. I don’t know anything about financials or how to maximize investments or anything.And it’s like obvious that people have been slacking for years probably. Because nothing adds up, our financial analysts must be so fucking shitty. I’m going to have a lot of cleaning up to do.”

He hasn’t said a word, only listens to you silently as he pours a glass of red wine, and you stick a jokingly accusatory finger at him, “You better not go blab to the press, I’ll know who it was.”

“I have no one to tell,” Ten chuckles, and you feel like you can take him at his word, perhaps because he isn’t in a suit vying for your professional and personal attentions.

“Who am I kidding though?” You mutter, draining half the glass of wine once he passes it to you. “It feels so good to talk to someone about this.”

“Y/n?”

You shift on your stool to see just who’d spotted you here drinking alone, desperately hoping that it’s not someone from the company. It’s not.

“Jaehyun?”

You’d expected he’d be back in DC by now, but no, he’s here in a leather jacket and dress pants, J4 ID badge pinned to his belt. He’s working for his dad instead? He nervously eyes your business suit and glass of wine combo as he asks, “What are you doing here?”

You tap the stem of your glass. “Drinking. What are you doing here?”

He glances past the bar, into the bowels of the restaurant, and then looks back at you. “Dinner with your dad. Thought that’s why you were here.”

Wait, that can’t be right. “Why the fuck are you having dinner with my dad?”

Before Jaehyun can answer, his father walks into the restaurant and stops in his tracks when he sees that you’re there. “Y/n.”

Though your new position affords you more power and status than he currently holds, you still feel inclined to bow your head deeply to him, “Congressman.”

“Congratulations on your promotion, y/n,” he praises you, but the smile doesn’t quite reach his eyes. “Truly a surprising move.”

A third person enters the restaurant, and it’s Jaehyun’s stepmother, dressed head to toe in black silk. You greet her first, not wanting to be awkward, “Stephanie, hello.”

She gazes over at you and doesn’t even respond, only walks right through to the maître d’. You’re taken slightly aback by her rude lack of acknowledgement, but you suppose that also comes with the territory.

“Sorry for my wife, she’s been in a mood lately,” Mr. Jung apologizes, then taps your arm softly. “Good to see you.”

You are completely baffled as to why he would be here to have a meeting with your father without you. There’s nothing for them to discuss anymore, no overlapping businesses or political maneuvering or concession speeches, so why a meeting now all of a sudden? And why the pointed exclusion of you? Jaehyun turns to follow his father, but you don’t want him to go walking into the lion’s den like this.

“Jae,” you whisper, trying to get only his attention. “Jae.”

He stops, earring flashing as he glances back at you, “Hmm?”

“I don’t know what you’re here for but listen to me,” you lower your voice to a point where you can barely hear yourself, sure that the message will only get to him and not also to Ten or anyone else in this restaurant. “Do not agree to anything my dad asks you to do. Stall, make excuses, throw a drink in his face, I don’t care. Don’t agree.”

Jaehyun’s eyebrows crease in confusion at your earnest plea. “What?”

There’s no reason for him to dip even a toe into a life like this, you don’t want him or his parents to get involved. “Just, just don’t. Okay?”

He nods, once, slowly, like he’s agreeing but doesn’t quite believe you, and then he disappears inside the restaurant.

There is a non zero chance your presence at Neo City will be mentioned to your father. Part of you wants that to happen, so you can go back there and keep watch over Jaehyun, keep your dad in check with whatever he’s planning. But the other, more terrified part of you absolutely does not want him to come out here and find you drunk.

You finish your wine, shoving your purse and wallet back into your bag. “I should go.”

Ten is undoubtedly curious about what’s just gone down, and he asks, “Who was that?”

“Just a kid I know.”

“No,” he shakes his head. “I mean the woman. She seems so familiar.”

“Congressman Jung was in the media for a long time before he retired. That’s his second wife, Stephanie,” you tell him. He’s new here, so he probably hasn’t gotten used to the world of semi-celebrities that often patron this place. Stephanie Jung is probably on the low tier of recognizable Bostonians that will come through here.

“Okay, now who was the kid?” Ten asks next with a saucy grin. “He was hot.”

“You didn’t get me drunk enough for that one tonight, Ten,” you laugh, because you’d need to be practically blackout to tell him the story of Jaehyun. And blackout is something you can’t ever be in public anymore.

“Thanks a lot,” you express your gratitude to him as you leave, because he’d actually treated you like the old y/n, someone who you might not ever be again.

—

You sit back in silence and let the men bicker back and forth for a solid five minutes after the meeting starts. Once there’s a lull in their ego stroking, you slap your palm down on the table to catch everyone’s attention.

“Listen up!” You assert loudly. “Everyone please shut up!”

Mr. Lee gives you the same look of disdain that’s been permanently on his face around you now, but he lowers himself into his seat across from the dais where you’re sat on. You shuffle through the papers that were provided to you for the discussion today and demand, “Can anyone please tell me why we have a sudden influx of hard cash when we haven’t had any new investors?”

The men look amongst each other, eyes wide, and you know they haven’t even spent a fraction of the time you have poring over every little character on these documents. “And why it looks like a third of our operating budget isn’t accounted for in any of these figures?”

Again, no answer.

“Also, why it looks like none of our scholarships have been pushed out in any sort of timely basis?”

You’d wanted to go right to the departments themselves, but apparently there’s a protocol in place, these stuffy weekly meetings where apparently nothing ever gets done. How are you supposed to figure these issues out if no one knows anything, including you?

“Simple errors from the accounting department, Ms. Suh, no need to get worked up over it,” Mr. Lee tries to pacify all your requests with the platitude, but it’s simply not enough.

“All due respect, COO Lee, but you probably haven’t crunched a single number in almost eight years,” you don’t have any problem calling him out like this. “I doubt CFO Lau has done so either, and that was actually in his job description.”

Henry’s hands on the table curl into a rage, but you know it’s not because you’ve spoken any falsehoods about him.

You call over Jessica, the assistant that was newly hired in Lisa’s place, and gesture for her to begin taking notes. Then, you inform them of your plans, “I’d like all the teams to stop what they’re currently working on and put together an explanation of all of the discrepancies I’ve marked down here.”

Several images go up onto the projector, circled and marked up in your red pen, and when it’s displayed in this way, it really emphasizes just how fucked up the calculations had been.

Mr. Lee purses his lips, “Is that really necessary?”

“What else do we do here? Sit and watch people’s money?” You ask it in a rhetorical way, but truth be told, after this, you’re not so sure yourself. “We can make this happen. My father is planning on running for president, I’d rather him not be asked questions about the defunct state of his personal company while on the campaign trail. Get it together, people.”

He bows his head to you, a gesture of concession that you know he will fight going forward, “Of course, Ms. Suh.”

“Thank you everyone, have a good day,” you pick up your papers and your laptop, and you stride out of the room first to let the others contemplate what you’ve assigned them.

There’s a shout down the hallway to your turned back, “You’re such a bitch, you know that?”

You grind your teeth so hard you could shred them out of your mouth, and then you turn around to face Henry. For a man that’s closer to forty than thirty, he is laughably insecure if he can be torn down by such a lowly little bitch like you are. A child bitch, more specifically, if Mr. Lee’s harsh words from the other day are what you’re going by.

“Why?” You adopt a mocking baby voice. “Did I hurt your feelings?”

“Such a bitch,” he mutters under his breath, and you cross your arms over your chest.

“If you want me to apologize, answer all those questions I asked for me.”

You know that he knows that you know he has no idea how to even remotely answer the queries you’d brought up in that meeting. You don’t even wait for him to fumble for an answer before you’re barreling ahead,“You can’t, so I’m asking the capable men and women of our company to do so for me.”

“I think you’re wrong,” he sputters, face red with effort. “I don’t think there’s anything wrong with the numbers.”

You start pacing back and forth in the hallway, hands on your hips as you feign hard thinking, “You know, everyone has been shitting on me and my father in the media, but I should really be given a great commendation for being the face of public ridicule in place of you fools.”

You glare at him, this fucking incompetent fool that will become your husband. You bow mockingly and deepen your voice into an imitation of him, “Thank you, y/n, for taking all the heat from us.”

“Bitch,” he spits out, intending for his words to hurt, but only fueling your ire instead. “ _Bitch._ ”

“You better get used to it,” you shrug, looking down at your nails because you couldn’t care less about him in the moment. “You obviously expect that you’re going to be able to treat me like this in our home just because I’m your wife. But don’t forget that you have to live with the fact that you still have to come into work and have me as your boss.”

He’s seconds away from boiling over, so you grab his hand and pat it condescendingly before you walk away, “Have a nice day, CFO Lau.”

There’s a familiar head of red hair exiting the back of the meeting room ahead of you, so you leave Henry behind to rush over to one of the accountants.

“Hey, Junmyeon, wait,” you stop him by grabbing his shoulder, hiding him into the water fountain alcove where no one can see the two of you together.

“Y/n?” He adjusts his glasses as he takes your concerned face in. “Is everything okay?”

The two of you had always been friendly during your time as an intern, he’d always treated you like his younger sibling, and always paid for you during happy hours. He feels like the one person at this damn place that is actually doing what he’s supposed to.

“Can you do me a favor?” You ask him quietly, glancing around to make sure no one’s using this corridor.

Junmyeon nods, tentative, and you press your file folder into his hands. “Can you look into all of these matters separately from your supervisor and let me know what you find?”

“O-oh,” he almost fumbles the papers everywhere with his nerves, but he gets it together. “Yes, of course.”

“Thank you.”

You finally feel like you have one ally in here, especially when he adds, “I assume this is between us?”

“Good man,” you tap his arm in gratitude, and you know the secret is safe.

Though you now have him on your side, he hasn’t really helped the poor quality of your day. Between the meeting, Henry calling you a bitch in a really open and public way, and your continuing confusion over the exact state of the company, you’re really having a shit day.

But worst of all, you can spot a camera crew at work in the building’s lobby. Camera crews are never good.

With an exasperated huff, you stalk over to where the people are milling about, and come to stand right in front of the camera, where the red light flashing lets you know that you’re currently being recorded.

You put on your best and most professional smile, “Hi there, excuse me. Who are you? Do you have a permit to be filming on my property?”

The man with huge eyes standing behind the camera stutters a little, quickly switching off the camera,“Y-your property? You’re – you are – no way.”

“y/n?” A quiet voice pipes up from behind you. “Is that really you?”

You turn, and see someone who was erased from your mind in all of the chaos that’s been going on, “Rosé?”

Her hair is blonde now, but her visitor’s pass does read _Rosé Park, Boston Globe Intern._ She looks nervous to see you, and while you want to tell her it’s okay, you want to make sure she’s not here to add to the rising negative level of coverage you’re getting in the media.

“You’re really CEO Suh?” The cameraman asks, truly astonished that you happen to be standing in the flesh before him.

“Yes, that’s me,” you reply acidly, tone starting to dip into irritation. “Would you mind answering my question?”

He wrings his hands nervously, fidgeting with the hem on his pullover. “My name is Kyungsoo Do, I’m a reporter. We’re here on assignment from the Boston Globe, but had no idea we might actually run into you.”

He hands you his approved filming release from your publicity department, and you glance it over. No one has been allowed inside S&L yet since you’ve taken over, and for this to be approved internally, it must mean that Kyungsoo and Rosé don’t have any sort of odious intentions.

He trails off, obviously wanting to say more but too scared to do so, so you give him a little push, “Do you have something else to add? You seem like you’re not finished.”

“Would you be willing to sit down for an interview?” He boldly requests, suddenly finding his confidence. “We were originally just going to get employees’ thoughts on the company and its direction, but you would take the piece to a whole different level.”

“We shouldn’t bother her,” Rose whispers into his ear. “We can just get our footage and go.”

You hold out your hand, keeping them from leaving, but you take a minute to think. All of the interviewx you’ve given have been with your dad at your side, with pre-planned questions and canned answers. If the public heard from you, the real you, they’d be able to see just exactly what you’re trying to do. Maybe then your employees will start helping you out as well.

“I can’t tonight, but I might be able to set something up,” you answer tentatively. “But I’ll get in touch with Rosé when I can.”

—

“Why would it be bad for you to do the interview again?” Ten asks as he wipes a glass down with his towel.

You munch on a handful of the free popcorn, take a sip of your wine, and shrug, “I don’t know, beyond our scheduled events it’s basically been a vacuum of silence from papa ever since I took over. I’d be asking for a fight.”

“But you’re the CEO, no?” Ten clarifies, just like you want to all the damn time. “Surely you can do whatever you want.”

“That’s not really how it works in my family.”

“No?”

Doing whatever you want has truly never been in the cards for you. The only time you’d done exactly what you wanted was a certain night at the Turks beach house. “Yeah, it’s very much papa says what goes and we fall in line. I had no involvement in any of the family business until now, so it’s totally uncharted waters.”

His forehead crinkles as he tries to make sense of your train of thought, and he voices his struggle out loud, “But you also think it would be a good idea to do it?”

“Yeah, because it would be my words coming from me,” you moan, sinking your head into your hands as you go through this back and forth yet again. “I have no idea what to do.”

“I say you should do it then,” Ten concludes, patting your head. “You have no problem telling me these things, just pretend they’re me.”

Rosé had always been a sweetheart to you, and Kyungsoo seemed more than nice enough in his polite request. Didn’t protest, didn’t make a scene in your lobby. You can’t see everything from the lens of suspicion, there’s no reason to get this worked up about it.

“Y/n!” Johnny calls, sticking his head through the door so you can see that he’s there.

“Gotta go. Thanks for the drink. And the advice.” You grab your purse after you’ve left Ten a generous tip and then you run out into the parking lot, where Johnny’s car is parked behind a huge track of planted bushes.

Once you’re inside and the doors are safely locked, Johnny turns to you, “Hey, okay, so why’d you want to meet here?”

You could’ve had this conversation at either of your houses, but you’d asked him to meet you here instead.

“Paranoia?” You joke, though it does have some legs of truth underneath it. “I don’t know.”

“Okay, let’s talk.”

“The Boston Globe wants to interview me,” you tell him about the inquiry you’d received. “I’m thinking about it but really don’t know what to do.”

Johnny nods, taking the information in slowly so he can process and ask, “Is there a catch? Are you scared this is some kind of expose?”

“No, I don’t think it is,” you admit, because you can’t map out a way that this will end poorly for you. “One of the reporter’s interns is this girl I knew at Harvard. Mark knew her, too.”

“Then why not just do it?” He suggests, like he doesn’t understand the exact internal turmoil you’re going through. “Dad can’t make you keep your mouth shut forever.”

“I don’t know, I feel like I’m so out of my depth here. There’s so much that’s missing.”

But Johnny isn’t really listening to you, he’s looking out the driver’s side window, at a car that’s across the way in the parking lot. “Hey, I know that guy.”

You sit up in your seat to follow the direction of where he’s looking, expecting to see some random company employee walking into the restaurant. What you don’t expect is the towering presence of man you had once been very familiar with, nervously striding over to the parked Mercedes.

“Matt?” You look at Johnny in surprise. “You know Matthew Kim?”

You’d never mentioned the formal to him, for obvious reasons, and their paths hadn’t crossed at the Turks villa, because Johnny had flown home before Matt had even arrived. But the elite of Massachusetts all are connected to each other in one way or another, so maybe Johnny does know him. Through Mark or something.

That’s why you’re particularly blown back in surprise when he says, “He’s the one who gave me the weed at your birthday party, huh. Small world.”

A small lick of cold fear trills up the back of your neck. “Johnny, what?”

“I honestly had no recollection of it until now, but seeing his face is like I’m experiencing deja vu. I definitely got it from him,” he doesn’t look a fraction as concerned as you are, more enthused by the connection he’s put together. But as soon as he sees your face, his smile evaporates. “Wait, you know him too?”

“He went to Harvard,” you murmur, trying to squint and make out either the license plate or the face of the driver inside. “He was president of the social club Mark was in. His father’s a professor at MIT and is also on the board.”

“Massachusetts elite for ya,” he jokes, just as you thought earlier, but you don’t catch it.

Because what you catch instead, is a full glimpse of the driver’s face. The same face that had screamed profanities to you just this morning. The same face that would soon be framed in a wedding photo in your house. Matthew is getting into a car with Henry Lau.

You slap Johnny’s arm, grasping his chin and turning it back out the window, gasping, “Is that, is that Henry? In the car?”

“I can’t see,” he stretches his head out of your grasp, then reclines his chair so he gets a different angle. “Oh, wait, yeah. That definitely is.”

The Mercedes’ lights flip on and even from across the way you can hear the engine roar to life. You’re still pretty well hidden by the bushes, so they don’t seem to have spotted you. Henry puts the car into gear, peeling out from the spot and exiting the lot in a real hurry.

“Follow them, John,” you order your brother. “Follow them.”

“Y/n?”

“Do it.”

At your stern tone, Johnny puts the car into reverse, tires skidding against the pavement as you hightail it after the pair of them. The blue Mercedes is fairly easy to follow, you have the license plate practically imprinted into your eyeballs, and you have to hold on for dear life as Johnny speeds through the Boston traffic to try and keep up.

“I’m telling you John, something’s off,” you’re panting, breath heavy with effort at the terrifying ride that you’re on.“I’ve been looking at the financials and nothing about any of the company dealings add up. There’s too much money in places where we should be spending, and not enough in the areas we need extra of it.”

He swerves past a stopping taxi, keeping his foot on the speed pedal, even as he looks at you in surprise, “What?”

“I don’t know what the fuck’s going on but this has been happening for a while, I think,” you admit, pressing your head against the cool glass of the window as you clutch at the door. “Last summer when I interned, there was a big incident when kids at Cambridge Secondary weren’t getting their scholarships on time. I thought Henry had blocked the funds out of arrogance but I have a feeling there wasn’t actually any allocated money and they had to siphon it off from somewhere.”

The kids had gotten their money, but your father had asked you to keep your nose out of it at the time. Junmyeon had only come by once after that, to tell you that all the seniors had received their scholarships, so you left it at that. But that cold case has to be reopened now. It’s just too much of a red flag at this point.

“And now Matt Kim and Henry together?” You wonder out loud, shifting violently in your seat as Johnny takes a particularly hard right to follow them across the bridge leading into Seaport.

“Didn’t you say that Professor Kim was on the board?” Johnny asks, trying to follow the threads you’re trying to connect. “Would Matt and Henry have to meet up for any reason because of that?”

You’re almost desperately griping at his excuses now, “John, just think and tell me if this makes any sense.”

“It doesn’t,” Johnny admits through gritted teeth as he speeds through a yellow light. “Matt doesn’t work at S&L, right?”

“Right, I have no idea where he’s working right now,” you confirm, knowing that it’s only the patriarch of his family that’s employed by yours.

“Then there’s no reason for him to be meeting with Henry,” Johnny is thinking out loud, finally convinced by what you’re saying to him. “And that definitely wasn’t two bros just shooting the shit. Plus Henry is like, significantly older than all of us. They wouldn’t just be friends.”

You’re in the outskirts of Seaport now, surrounded mostly by apartments under construction and warehouse buildings. If the traffic dies down even slightly, you’ll be completely exposed in your quest to follow after them, but you can’t lose them when you’re this close. Johnny keeps an appropriate distance, hovering behind a van and a Tesla, but after three more intersections, Henry’s car pulls off into a loading dead end filled with trucks.

“There, there! Pull up behind that bus,” you shout, and Johnny slams on the brakes, tires of his car letting out a loud screech. He maneuvers the car between a trio of parked buses up ahead, giving you a completely shielded front row seat to what you have no idea is about to happen.

“I’m scared,” Johnny mutters under his breath as you both strain to look through the tiny crack between the buses.

Matthew gets out of the car first, runs around to the other side and opens the door so Henry can join them. Henry nonchalantly buttons up his suit jacket while Matthew looks around in paranoia, but once they seem satisfied with their lack of company, they start walking to the trucks.

It’s obvious they have some kind of destination in mind, because they don’t stop and contemplate any of the first five trucks in the row. By the sixth, Henry stops and looks at the license plate, then keeps walking. Same with the seventh, but at the eighth, he stops and says something to Matthew.

Matthew nods, then pulls out a set of keys from inside his pocket.

“One of those trucks is theirs?” Johnny breathes out, as if they’d hear you from even inside your closed car.

You can’t shush him, can’t tell him to shut up, can’t do anything but stare as Matthew takes the key and puts it into the lock at the bottom of the U-Haul, twisting it once, twice, and then clicking the storage bed open. He reaches for the handle, and throws it up, revealing…

“Tiffany boxes?” Johnny scoffs as he sees the large number of cardboard boxes stamped with the Tiffany & Co. logo. “Now I really think you’re paranoid, y/n.”

Your heart is racing with equal parts terror and disappointment, you really don’t know what you’d expected to be inside the truck. Shipments from a luxury jewelry retailer hadn’t exactly come to mind when thinking of what Matthew and Henry were getting up to. 

“Fuck,” you curse lowly as you flop back against the seat, leaning your head back against the headrest for some support. “I’m sorry.”

He pats your hand, sympathetic but no longer convinced, “Let’s go before anyone sees. I’ll drop you off at home.”

Your head is pounding with a car chase-induced headache, Henry and Matthew and the truck replaying in your head over and over as you walk into your house. The TV is absolutely blasting, and you can feel your migraine start to spike into absolute fury.

“Hello?” You call into your house as you drop your purse and shoes by the entryway, too lazy to put them in their proper place.

“In the living room!” Mark calls, and you walk in to see him and Jaehyun on your couch, boxes of pizza littered over your Ottomans.

“Red Sox are on,” he says as he turns to hand you a slice of pizza, doing a double take when he sees you. “You look like shit.”

“Thank you, Mark! Very cool!” You bite at him very sarcastically before beelining straight to the fridge and grabbing a beer. Truth be told, you’d need something harder to get over it, but you’ll have to wait until you’re alone.

“What were you doing?” Jaehyun asks, curiously eyeing your disheveled appearance. “Your hair is a legit mess.”

You take a long swig of beer, then sigh, “Just out with John, you know.”

You can’t exactly tell him you just spent the last half an hour in a high speed car chase across all of Boston. You press a hand to your forehead, hoping that it was some sort of fever dream, but nope, your skin is at its normal temperature. Anyways, Jaehyun really shouldn’t be spending any more time in your house. But the fact that your aura finally seems somewhat calm because of his presence is enough for you not to ask him to immediately leave.

“That came for you today,” Mark tilts his head towards a garment bag that’s hung on the railing by your stairwell. “Looks like clothes so I hung it up.”

“Thanks, Marky.” You put your beer down so you can pad over to the delivery and see exactly what it is.

There’s a note of ivory stationery pinned to the front of the bag, addressed to you in elegant calligraphy. You open the card, and your nail nearly tears the skin on your thumb apart when you read, _I know the celebration won’t be for a while, but thought I’d at least send a sample over. Let me know what you think. Xo -V_

The card flutters to the ground from your shaking fingers as you lift up on your tiptoes to reach the zipper at the top of the bag. You fumble at the plastic piece, it slipping out of your fingers at least twice before you’re able to unzip the garment bag fully.

“What is it?” Mark hollers above the announcers, and then his voice quiets. “Oh.”

Hung up on your staircase is a stylish swath of fabric, beaded and embroidered and done up into a garment of luxury, train neatly folded up into the bottom of the bag, delicate lace sleeves crossed in front. Hung up on your staircase is a white wedding dress. Vera Wang had sent you a sample wedding dress. A dress for your wedding to Henry.

“Oh, y/n,” Mark sighs forlornly, and you can’t even find any words in the deep troves of your vocabulary to respond as you stare at it.

It is every girl’s dream dress, princessy and lovely and expensive, but it is not yours.There’s not a hint of purple woven within the ivory threads, nor the comforting scent of lavender, nor the promise of a groom you had always hoped for. You want to voice your heartache out loud, to have Jaehyun run and hug you in a dramatic display of emotion, but you can’t. You can’t.

All your mouth fumbles out is a soft, “I don’t even have a ring yet.”

“I, I’m gonna go,” Jaehyun stutters, standing abruptly and making an exit from your home, slamming the door behind him.

But you’re evilly enchanted by the dress, it’s death grip on you so devilishly strong that you can’t turn and stop him from going.

“You don’t have to do this,” Mark states resolutely as he comes over to you and zips up the bag so you don’t have to see it anymore.

“I do,” you whisper to the bag. “You know I do.”

It had been disguised as a gift, but it’s really a threat. You need to follow through with all of your promises to ensure that everyone you care about can continue to live their normal lives. You can’t just send this right back to Vera, so it will have to sit in your house and haunt you, a constant reminder of the impending life that you’re about to enter into.

“I’m sorry, baby gorl. I really am.”

Mark buries his head into your shoulder, and you hold hands in the middle of your house, sad and together.

—

You’re still contemplating Henry and Matt and the dress and everything when your phone rings the next afternoon. You see that it’s a Boston area code, so you answer.

“Hello, S&L Corporation.”

“Hey, it’s Kyungsoo,” the reporter identifies himself.

“Oh, hey,” you allow yourself to relax at the sound of his friendly voice. “Something the matter?”

This morning, you’d given in and decided that you were going to speak to reporters on your own. You’d set up the interview for Friday with Jessica’s help, and they were supposed to be coming by later today to shoot some pictures of you first. If he’s calling again, maybe there’s been a wrinkle in the plan.

“Nothing’s wrong,” Kyungsoo assuages your worries. “But there was something I was thinking about.”

You lean back in your office chair, “Shoot.”

“Do you have any old memorabilia, something S&L related that we can show? Not sure exactly what my vision is, but I think we’re going for the strong family ties angle.”

You’d already agreed to do it, but it is at least a comforting reassurance that Kyungsoo is planning on highlighting your family tree in this piece. Instead of putting all his emphasis on the branches that had apparently been skipped to get to yours, like some other papers had done. You glance around your desk space, wondering if you already have something he’s looking for, a newspaper clipping or an old photo or the like, but there’s nothing.

“I’ll have to go down to archives,” you think out loud, that part of the building still unfamiliar to you. “But I should be able to find something.”

“Great, we’ll be there in about ten minutes to shoot the pictures. We’re still on for Friday for the official interview, yeah?” Kyungsoo confirms after letting you know his estimated arrival time.

“Yes, I have you for one on Friday,” you affirm, then you end the call so you can run to archives before he gets here.

There’s one specific picture you’re thinking, from the first day the downtown Boston office had opened. Johnny is half the size he is now, wearing an old Tom Brady jersey, and you’re in a tutu from your halfhearted attempt at ballet. But you can still picture those proud smiles on your faces as you hold your dad’s hand, smiles that you feel might never make it back on your face.

You get off the elevator on the main floor and are immediately met with Junmyeon’s presence, “Hey, y/n. I mean CEO Suh.”

“Hi, Junmyeon.”

He pointedly lowers his voice into a whisper, “You know that thing you talked to me about? I put together a folder of stuff for you.”

It’s a thick file, even thicker than what you’d originally passed off to him, and you can’t tell if that’s a good or bad sign. At least if he could find a problem this quickly then maybe you’ll be able to remedy it in a relatively fast-paced manner.

You smile appreciatively at him. “Great. Thank you so much.”

“It’s not what—,” he starts, but your watch pings with an alert that Kyungsoo and his team will be arriving in five minutes.

“Can we talk later?” You cut him off apologetically. “I have people from the Globe coming in a little.”

His lips press together tightly, like he is not pleased to put this off any further. But he must sense how overwhelmed you are with your pressing time constraints, because he simply nods and steps aside so you can pass through.

You pick up your pace as you weave through the back hallways, going down a flight of stairs to the basement level. It is so dark and musty and devoid of life down there that the man at the desk outside of the archives door actually spits out his water in surprise when he sees you there.

“Ma’am? Are you here for the company archives?”

“I need to pick up something really quick. I have an appointment at four,” you shift the file folder in your arms so you can hold out a hand.

“No one’s been down here in ages.”

You sigh impatiently, tapping your foot against the ground. “I’ll be fast. Just give me the key. I know what I want.”

“Okay. I’ll be here,” he informs you as he drops the ring of keys into your hand.

The silence of the archives is a healing salve to your soul, it’s just you and the neatly organized file cabinets, lined up in alphabetical order from the entrance all the way down a long, long hallway. There’s a separate set of cabinets organized by date, and you head that way first, looking for pictures from that specific opening day event.

You find the May files and unlock that drawer, thumbing through the file folders one by one until you find a set labeled OPENING DAY, BOSTON - PICTURES. Just as you predicted, there is a nostalgic square of Kodak film awaiting you inside that folder.

You look happier than you remember, your tiny fingers clutching at your dad’s hand, and Johnny’s chest is puffed out so immensely with pride. How did it all get to be this way? The absence of your mother is keenly felt in this picture, probably one of the first taken after her departure, and the spot where she should’ve been is screaming at you with an indecipherable message. Your fingers run over the image of your little face, and you hope that you can get back to this point, that you’ll show this to your dad and it’ll all go back to how it should be.

You open the folder Junmyeon had given you to put the picture inside, and you catch a glimpse of his handwriting at the top, a note that reads _look into Seaport accounts._

That sparks something in your mind, and you wander over to the other side of the row of cabinets. You’re purely curious, you have no theories or hypotheses or any sort of specifics you’re looking for. You walk down the row, singing the song in your head as you do, ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRS… T.

There are three columns of T file cabinets, so you bypass the _Ta_ and _Te_ markings for the one labeled _Ti._ You unlock the first drawer, and there’s nothing amongst those files that really stands out to you.You unlock the second drawer, and instead of opening with ease like the first did, it thunks open with a metallic reverberation that echoes throughout the silent room.

“Oh fuck,” you swear involuntarily when you see what’s inside.

It’s a cardboard box, stamped with the Tiffany & Co. logo. The same kind of cardboard box you’d seen in that truck.

“Ms. Suh? Your four o’clock is here,” the archive head calls into the space from his post by the door.

“Tell them to reschedule,” you mumble, your eternal soul guillotining itself in the back of your throat as your trembling fingers reach for the stamped lid. And though you are one hundred percent sure you never could’ve guessed, you know exactly what’s inside as soon as your vision is unimpeded.

“Ms. Suh?”

“I can’t right now,” you shout back loudly. “Tell them to reschedule.”

Inside, well, inside, the contents speak for themselves. It’s thousands of slips of cardstock, all printed with the same set of words.

**MASSACHUSETTS ELECTION FOR GOVERNOR**

Candidates: () Herbert Suh(x) Jeffrey Jung, Sr.

**tbc.**

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i decided to break this story up into one more chapter for narrative flow, so now there should be 11 instead of 10. but who knows, that may change too im an indecisive person looooool. 
> 
> enjoy! hope everyone is staying safe


	6. sacrifice

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> At that moment, there’s a muffled scream from outside the empty restaurant that makes the hair on your arm stand up on end, “Ah! Fuck!”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> surprise bitch! i bet you thought you'd seen the last of me
> 
> this is a doozy of a chapter so, tw: some violence and blood in this, i will be adding it into the tags as well

You flip the ballot over on the bar for the thousandth time, taking another gulp of your whiskey.

Fuck.

You’d wanted to assume the best, that these were just misplaced or accidental misprints or something, anything. But you know the truth without asking. Your father had rigged the election for governor, had sequestered away thousands of votes cast in favor of Jaehyun’s father. You don’t know if this is the sole reason he’d won the position, but you know that it had played a role. The truth of it is that Jaehyun’s father had been so stunned that night. He’d expected a victory.

And now your father is running for president. S&L’s going to have to get more file cabinets if he needs to rig this election, too.

You know that this is just the tip of the iceberg, that there wasn’t just jewelry in those boxes in the truck. But you’re sure this would probably have been kept a secret forever, it’d seriously been a culmination of several lucky guesses for you to even stumble upon it.

You don’t know what the fuck to do. You have the picture proof, have stolen a copy of one of the ballots for physical evidence, and know exactly where to find the rest of it.You have to tell someone, go to the feds or something, but you need a night. You just need a night to marinate on this, to fully register the collapse of everything you’ve known to be true.

So much is happening, between this and the celebration for what’s happening tomorrow and absolutely fuck else, you’re glad that Ten has recognized this as a night of mourning and is freely pouring you the drinks. You’re lucky that the dinner evolved from a sit down affair into some manly jockeying so that you can be alone right now.

Well, not so alone, because a familiar voice interjects, “This seat taken?”

You stuff the errant ballot into your work bag, looking right up into the glare of Jaehyun’s handsome face. You smile softly, “Soon to be?”

He lowers himself onto the stool and Ten slides him a glass of water. How can he look so handsome like this, just sipping water in his Georgetown tee over his work pants, earrings and bracelet sparkling even in the dull light.

“You just happen to be here?” You ask knowingly, because it’s not just a coincidence he’s shown up while you’re also here.

“Picking up some food for pops. He’s still at the office,” he brushes the question off nonchalantly, though he caves once you fix him with a stern stare. “It’s all over social media that Senator Lau was spotted here.”

“Great,” you groan, just knowing that a ton of reporters are probably camped outside of the parking lot. “They’re over in the cigar lounge, if you’re wondering or care to join.”

“I’m fine here.”

“The announcement should be made tomorrow.”

“Congratulations.”

You realize this is the first time you’ve talked, like actually sat and had a full on conversation that wasn’t done in passing under heavy outside presence. This is the first time you’ve actually had a conversation since you _slept together._ Just what is your life becoming?

“How’s Minnie?” You ask as you aimlessly trace the rim of your glass. “I haven’t been able to talk to her since Turks, even though she hasn’t exactly been blowing up my phone.”

Minnie’s lack of communication with you had probably been a direct result of whatever had transpired with Jaehyun. She’s undoubtedly found out the truth and has chosen to go silent as a result. You can’t blame her, especially knowing that you were part of the reason why Jaehyun had blown her off. A sad fact, really, but perhaps it’s better for her to stay holed up in DC, away from the drama that surrounds your family. And it’s not like you can give her much of your already preoccupied time.

Jaehyun fixes you with the most severe stare you’ve ever seen on his face, then he drops it oh so casually, “No idea.”

“Yeah?”

“Why would I know what she’s up to?” He pauses with the glass of whiskey halfway up to his lips, tongue darting out to wet his mouth. “That’s something only her boyfriend would know.”

Through all of the bullshit, the revelations and the drama and the power mongering, at heart you’re still this twenty one year old girl. A twenty one year old girl who’s just found out this one particular boy is particularly unattached.

“Hmm,” you hum lightly, ruddiness creeping up into your face. “Good to know.”

“So, Henry Lau, huh?” He questions you without a care, elbowing you in the side.

“Nice, dude,” you groan as the action causes you to spill a little of your whiskey. “Told you all that time ago that I was jealous of your life. Pops wouldn’t make you do that kind of thing, right?”

 _You have the perfect life, you go to a school that you picked yourself, you have the job that you want and the girlfriend that you want._ If you’d been Jeffrey Jung’s daughter instead, you would’ve gone to college in the sunny south, somewhere like Emory, you would’ve been working full time as an education advocate and you would’ve been able to be with a person who means something to you.

He shakes his head in disgust. “Absolutely not.”

“Must be nice,” you mutter.

“I’m surprised your dad didn’t want Johnny to take over,” he speculates, because he doesn’t know the actual truth. “You know, first born son and all. He asked my dad to endorse him for president, isn’t that weird?”

That is such a drop of water in the ocean of fuckery you’re in that you don’t even have the energy to unpack it. “Nothing surprises me anymore.”

“Obviously dad said he’d think about it. So we didn’t agree,” he lets you know that he had taken your advice from that night. He’s safe for now.

At that, you drain your drink in thanks, and Ten picks up on your unspoken desire,“You want another?”

“Yes, want to drink with me?” You offer, and so Ten pours three shots of tequila, one for each of you.

Once Ten has scooped up his shot, he asks, “What are we toasting to?”

“My last night as a single woman,” you proclaim in a dark voice, itching to have this alcohol in your system.

“Oh yeah?”

“Yeah, arranged marriage remember? You probably don’t know that becoming the CEO of S&L Corporation means I have to get married to a feckless idiot, right?”

“Yikes, honey,” Ten’s mouth twists in disgust and yours wants to do the same.

“Yikes is right. Calling my fiancé a feckless idiot is an insult to feckless idiots.”

The three of you clink your shotglasses together and down the alcohol, the most depressing toast you’ve ever shared with everyone. As you wince at the rancid taste of the spirit, Jaehyun slaps you on the back to get you through it, and Ten eyes the two of you carefully before inquiring, “So, your last night as a single woman. What is in the cards for you tonight?”

“I don’t know, get drunk,” you lift your glass, already hearing the slur in your voice. “Indulge in a fantasy or two.”

The words leave your mouth before you realize the implication of your phrasing, and you hear the sharp intake of breath that Jaehyun takes next to you.

“Can you give me a second, dude?” He asks Ten quietly; the other man just picks up his towel and disappears into the door behind the bar.

So, now it’s just you and Jaehyun alone again. The last time this had happened had been such a profound moment of sincere affection that you’re genuinely afraid it’ll happen again right now. How will you go into your impending marriage knowing that Jaehyun will have this hold over you forever? It’s better to leave that night in the past than to have him draw it back to the present, beautifully and painfully having every little detail of you plucked apart.

He steels himself, then blurts, “Okay, cards on the table. If my dad had been anyone else, would you have given me a second look?”

At that moment, there’s a muffled scream from outside the empty restaurant that makes the hair on your arm stand up on end, “Ah! Fuck!”

“Did you hear that?” You whisper, looking back through the window but seeing nothing but darkness.

“Wha—,” Jaehyun starts to ask, but then you hear the same scream. _AH! FUCK!_

“Wait, wait. Shh,” you slide off the barstool, running right over to the door of the restaurant and pushing it open just a crack so you can hear the noise from the outside more clearly.

 _Get off me!_ is what you hear this time, followed by the extremely unnerving sounds of someone getting brutally assaulted.

You don’t even think twice before you’re running out the front door, keeping yourself pressed to the building so the shadows of the veranda hide you. Jaehyun’s hand is on yours as the two of you creep around the building, the noises growing louder with each successive step, and you come to a stop behind the brick wall that keeps the trash cans out of view.

You turn your back to the brick, Jaehyun’s form right in front of you, shielding you from the outside. You wait and listen for the next feral snarl, “I swear if you’re like that I will throw you right out onto the highway for road kill.”

The noise of a steel-toed boot coming into contact with bone crackles through the air, followed by a blood-chilling scream of pain and the same snarl, “Don’t be such a fucking disgrace, you seriously are fucking sick!”

Whoever’s being attacked is sobbing now, the sputtering breaths scratching into your ears in between the screams, and the severely villainous voice growls, “Your duty to this family is marriage! If that stupid Suh girl can get over it and do this for her brother, you can do this for us.”

_If that stupid Suh girl can get over it._

“What?” Jaehyun breathes, and you force yourself to look.

There are two hulking men in black baseball hats and sweaters, standing over the small form of someone crumpled onto the asphalt. At first it’s hard to see, because the person’s bloodied figure is partially blocked by the shorter thug’s legs.

But when they bend down to lift the victim up, shaking their torso back and forth with a ferocious, “Get up, you useless sack of shit. Get up,” you manage to catch a glimpse of a beloved little face.

“Mark! Mark!” You shriek, sprinting out from your hiding spot and launching yourself at the goon who has his fist raised, prepared to hit Mark square in the face.

You heave your entire bodyweight into the goon, smacking him right in the nose with the heel of your hand, crunching the bones in his nose in one retaliatory blow. You go tumbling to the ground, allowing yourself a moment to pull off one of your stilettos and launch it right at the thug’s face, narrowly missing his eye.

“You stupid bitch!” He growls, backhanding you with a punishing force, cutting open your cheek with the ring he’s wearing and sending you flying with the inertia of the action.

You nearly black out when your head hits the concrete, and the pain blooming in your eyes has registered you momentarily blind. The warm blood dripping down your face is the only sensation you have that lets you know you’re still alive. Once your hands find some kind of purchase against the ground, you’re scrambling frantically, trying to find Mark’s body on the concrete before you.

“Gerald, for god sake, what the fuck are you doing?” One of them is saying, and someone else is calling your name, but all you can focus your draining consciousness on is Mark and finding him and making sure he’s alive.

“She hit me, Ivan! She broke my nose! That little bitch has to pay.”

Your vision is returning to you in spots, enough that you can see the shallow rise and fall of Mark’s breath, the way his eye is purple and swollen closed, how he has a cut across his cheek just like the one you have. Your hands are frantic across his chest, trying to get under him enough that you can get him standing, because you need to run. You hope that Jaehyun’s long gone, because he’ll be next on the ground if they find him.

“Mark, can you get up? Please Mark, get up,” you’re heaving him upwards, trying to spur him into moving, because you’re going to get destroyed if you just sit here. “Please get up.”

You stagger to your feet together, somehow leaning on each other in enough upwards display of force that you can stand up on shaky legs, Mark leaning all of his weight on you from behind. You hold your arms out beside you so that they’ll have to go through you to reach him, and you bombard these two thugs with your most piercing cry, “Don’t touch him!”

The same man who’d hit you earlier raises his hand with the ring, aiming it in your direction. You squeeze your eyes shut and try to duck your face as best as you can, but the blow never comes.

“Now, now, Gerald,” a smooth voice assuages the tension, and your vision still hasn’t completely returned to the point where you can make out the person who’s arrived. “There’s no need to hurt her.”

“Uncle,” he immediately bows his head.

“Uncle?” You marvel out loud, squinting hard, but the mystery guest answers your question for you.

“Ms. Suh, please move. I have a matter to discuss with my son.”

Now that he’s stepped into the parking lot lights, you see clearly now that the man that is there with you is Mr. Lee, that the very men who had just attacked you and your best friend are Mark’s cousins. Mr. Lee does not look fazed or surprised at the state of both of you.

You grasp Mark’s arm’s behind you and back up another step, shaking your head in defiance, “No.”

“What is the meaning of this?” A booming question peals out into the parking lot, and your shoulder sag in relief when you see your father emerging from the back entrance of the restaurant, followed out by Henry and a few others.

“Papa!” You cry, keeping a firm hold on Mark. “Papa, please help me!”

“Eugene?” He asks his friend calmly as he hangs back instead of coming over to you.

In turn, Mr. Lee addresses his son, “Minhyung, will you explain to the governor why we are here?”

Mark’s head lolls against your neck, and you feel the brush of his hair as he defiantly shakes his head no.

Ivan, the taller man who hadn’t actually touched you, turns to Mr. Lee, and you catch the flash of a cross pendant around his neck as he affirms, “We were teaching him a lesson for disrespecting our family name.”

“We weren’t doing anything!” Mark’s rickety voice mumbles out. “You don’t know me!”

You have no idea what he’s talking about, but it doesn’t really matter. Because you are certain that if you leave him alone with his family, they will kill him.

You clear your throat, and then primly interrupt their argument, “Are you sure about that? That he doesn't want to get married?” All of the men, your father included, fall silent to look at you in confusion, and you take a trembling gulp of air before you declare, “How is that possible when he’s been in love with me this entire time?”

“What?” Mr. Lee spits, and you put a shaky hand on Mark’s to really sell the most important ruse of your life.

“We have been in love since we were kids, wanted to get married once we were done with Harvard, but now we can’t. So please, tell me more about why you think your son won’t get married,” you match his vitriol with a gallon of your own, inflammatory and protective all at once.

“What are you saying?”

This will make both Henry and your father mad, but will get them off whatever trail Mark’s on and help keep him safe, so you steel yourself and you say, “I’m saying that I was engaged to Mark Lee, still am, until I am forced to give up the love of my life tomorrow.”

Jaehyun emerges from the shadows at those words, running up and throwing himself between the pair of you and demons of them. You’re physically stunned by his presence there, especially when he holds out his hands and lies through his teeth, “It’s true. I was there when it happened.”

“Mr. Jung, you should go. This is a family matter,” your father warns. Jaehyun moves to the side, but doesn’t follow orders, instead standing and turning to look right in your eyes as you continue to hold onto Mark.

Mr. Lee looks at both of you, and then the venom sears into his voice, “If you’re engaged, then get married.”

What.

“Dad!” Mark musters the first words he can in his injured state, the tears dripping from his face landing onto your bare shoulder.

“Minhyung,” he orders. “Do as I say.”

Mr. Lee pulls out a handgun and levels it at Mark’s face, right above your shoulder.

Everybody scrambles at the action. You back up in terror, sealing your body to Mark’s so he’s completely protected.Henry ducks to the pavement though he’s behind the weapon. Jaehyun shifts so he can try and block the two of you again, only to be shoved to the floor by Gerald, hitting the ground with a crunch. And there is your father, standing still amidst it all.

“Papa!” You scream, the tears starting to spill onto your cheeks, and that spurs him into some kind of action, though it isn’t much.

He takes a step forward, putting a hand on Mr. Lee’s shoulder, muttering a low,“Eugene.”

“No. This is a matter between me and my son that your daughter just had to get involved in,” he angrily shrugs off your father’s hand, then focuses in on the pair of you. “If you’re telling the truth, you will get married right now.”

“Eugene…” your father tries once more, but is denied again.

“Herbert! I will pay the senator the dowry he’s owed, it isn’t announced yet,” Mark’s father barks out and the gun is somehow pointed to you now, in a location where one bullet will sever both your lives.“End your twenty one years of disappointing me and do something you’re told for once. Uphold the reputation of the family who built you.”

Mark’s hand clenches around yours, he’s weeping into your shoulder, you’re sobbing and holding him up, Jaehyun is there on the floor bleeding, and your father continues standing there.

And then he says, “My lawyer is inside. He can draw up the marriage contract.”

You stagger in place, the weight of Mark crashing against you as you start to beg, “Papa! Please!”

Your father shakes his head grimly, mouth set in a line. “You’re old enough to know that your actions have consequences.”

Jaehyun groans loudly in pain, hand flying to the wound on his head where it’d smashed into the concrete and you turn to scream at him, “Jaehyun, go! Now!”

“No, Mr. Jung should stay and watch this, I think,” Mr. Lee cunningly suggests, and the two thugs pick him up and hold him upright so he’s pressured to watch the pair of you.

Maxwell Shim comes striding out of the restaurant, briefcase in one hand and legal pad in the other. He passes it off to your fathers, who spend a minute certifying the legal jargon before Mr. Lee starts to approach you once again.

The legal pad is shoved into your unoccupied hand and then the gun is leveled at you. “Sign. You first.”

You wrap Mark’s arm around your waist so that you have full use of both hands. The tip of the pen violently swings back and forth as you try to steady yourself enough to sign your name on the line that Maxwell has drawn out for you. You can’t even read the details, you just do as you’re told.

“Come on Mark, you’ve gotta do this,” you murmur, transferring his weight onto you more fully so his hands are freed.

You position the pen in his hand, placing the ink right on the line he’s meant to sign. Gently curling your fingers around his, you help him scrawl out a shaky signature, then you toss the paper back at your assailants.

“We are gathered here today to witness the union of Minhyung, son of Eugene, and y/n, daughter of Herbert,” Maxwell begins the sham of a ceremony as soon as they’re satisfied with your legal markings. “Who gives this woman away?”

You shift your best friend so he’s standing in front of you, and his face is deathly pale, crimson blood already crusting into patches on his face. You hug him tightly, holding him so you can watch the flutter of his eyelids, pleading, “It’ll be okay Mark, you’re gonna be fine, I’m here with you.”

“Me, her father,” your father nods right at Max, indicating his consent, and you feel a fresh set of tears seep right out of your soul.

You can’t contemplate the way he’s breaking your heart when Mark looks dangerously close to passing out right on top of you, you’re begging him now, “Just look at me, just stay awake. You have to stay awake, okay? Stay awake.”

“If there are any objections,” Max proclaims. “Speak them now.”

Past Mark’s shaking shoulder, you see Jaehyun there being held up, wincing in discomfort as a trail of blood drips down his eye. You need him to not say anything, you know he wants to, but he can’t.

“Mark, I love you, you’re my best friend. I’m so sorry,” you whisper, words from you to only him.

“Y/n, do you?” Max addresses you.

You screw your eyes shut. “I do.”

“Minhyung, do you?”

There’s no response from him, and though your eyes are closed, you hear the safety being pulled back on the gun. But there’s no fear anymore, because if you die right now, here in the arms of your best friend, you’ll know you get to go to heaven and see him. You can only hope that Jaehyun will think of you when you’re gone.

“Mark. Mark,” you whisper again, brushing your hand against his shoulder blade, against the back of his neck, against the baby soft hair on his head. “C’mon.”

His head lolls back in agony, skin cracking on his lips as he croaks out, “I… do.”

“By the power vested in me by the state of Massachusetts, I now pronounce you man and wife.”

You press the tiniest of kisses to his mouth, because you know they won’t let you go without it, then your head sags in relief, coming to rest against Mark’s collarbone. Finally it’s over.

“The car. Now,” you’re ordered by someone, you don’t have the energy to look, and then you’re being yanked, keeping Mark in tow.

You keep a death grip on his arm as the two of you are pushed through the parking lot and then unceremoniously dumped into the backseat of a waiting vehicle. Mark goes sprawling off the seat, and you dive for him as the door slams shut. You corral him back into place, lying him down so his head is in your lap, then let out an ear piercing scream when something is slammed against the side of the car.

Jaehyun’s face is mashed across the window, streaking it with a garish swath of his cerise blood, a meaty hand at the back of his head forcing him to take in the sight of you and Mark.

The threat is issued, audible even from inside the car, “Just know this is what awaits your pretty boy face if any of this gets out,” and then they crush his head against the glass one more time, sending him collapsing out of sight.

“Jaehyun!” You press your hands up to the window, shouting at the top of your lungs. “Jaehyun!”

But the car peels out from its spot, affording you no last glimpse of Jaehyun in the middle of the parking lot, unconscious.

You’re driven home, shoved out of the car by the driver onto the doorstep of your townhouse, and then the vehicle revs away into the night. It takes you a solid fifteen minutes to gather the strength to lift Mark up to the point where you can actually bring him through the front door, and all your heaving has started to open up the scabbed-over wounds that cover his body.

He’s bleeding freely on the hardwood of your entryway, you have to take a pause for five minutes on each stair leading up to his bedroom just so you can keep the dark spots from blooming in your vision.You rip the covers off his bed so he doesn’t stain them completely, and once he’s laying down in the middle of his mattress you gently lift off his tee just to see how bad the damage it is.

His torso is completely purple, covered with a garish mural of the brutality he’d just endured, a particularly large gash ripped open across his chest. This is what worries you the most, because he’s feverish and already soaking through the towel the second you press it onto him.

“I don’t know what to fucking do, there’s so much blood,” you whisper to yourself as you scramble for more towels to staunch the bleeding. You know there’s a person posted out front watching you, you can’t go to the hospital, can’t call someone to come here.

You gently lift his head so you can wipe the blood off his face with a wet washcloth, and he moans. “Hurts.”

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” you soothe, using even less pressure than before on his face as you clean him up, rocking him back and forth on the mattress.

It’s kind of cathartic, in a sick way, cleaning up his injuries like this, returning him to the pristine little Mark you know. You cover him in antibiotic cream, wrap him up in a soft blanket, and get him to force down some over the counter painkillers you have. He falls asleep pretty quickly, though you’re not entirely sure if he’s actually lost consciousness.

It’s only then that you allow yourself to assess the personal damage, in the tiny mirror above your bathroom sink.

The side of your head is covered in blood, matting into your hair in nasty, stringy spirals. There’s a deep cut slashing its way through your eyebrow, eyelid, and cheek, a tick mark that will become a permanent reminder of your defiance. Of course, none of that is tallying up the emotional damage done tonight, but that has to be shoved aside right now out of practicality.

There’s no tenderness when you clean yourself up, you scrub your skin ’til it’s aching and raw. You stick your whole head under the shower so you can watch the whirlpool of lifeblood make its way down your drain. The objective fact right now is that you’re both alive, Mark barely so, but you’re alive and you’re together.

There’s a clang against the fire escape in your bedroom, and you rush out of the bathroom to peek out of the window. Once you see what’d caused the noise, an errant rock, you throw up the sash and duck out onto the metal grating.

“Jaehyun?!” You hiss in surprise. “How did you even get up there?”

He has blood in his hair, a fat cut on his lip, but his eyes sparkle in the moonlight as he cheekily sticks his foot off your neighbor’s fire escape, “They had their ladder out.”

“What if _they’re_ here?” You look down into the back alley of your street, but there’s no lurking cars, no signs of life besides the yowl of the stray cat that lives behind your recycling bins.

I don’t care,” he pleads earnestly, dangling his hand into the space between your balconies. “I need to know if you’re okay.”

“No,” you choke out, one solitary tear waltzing its way out of your eye. “Are you?”

He smiles, close-lipped and tight, and shrugs, “Not really.”

“I’m sorry,” you sigh, because this is all your fault, once again.

“It’s okay.”

You extend your hand out past the railing, a canyon of longing present in the breadth of air between your hands, and he stands on his tiptoes to try and reach out even further. It’s an insurmountable distance to overcome, your fingers only drifting in that empty space, and this is nothing but a sign of the changing times.

“I should go before your neighbors find a strange man on their fire escape,” he sniffs, pulling his hand back to his side as you sadly nod. He can’t go, not like this.

Jaehyun means more than something to you. He means everything.

“Hey, not that it matters anymore but,” you laugh wetly, because you’re just a little bit late on it all. “I’ve given you a thousand second looks. Still would, if I could.”

A pristine tears meanders down onto his cheek, a diamond of anguish that cuts more deeply than any other injury you’ve sustained, and his hair blows over his forehead in the reassuring night wind. This is it, your last look, one thousand plus one, a look you’ll somehow have to survive on forever. You contemplate all of him, and then you’re going back through the window, shutting it behind you.

You burrow yourself into the blankets beside Mark - _your husband_ \- and fall into the sinister clutches of sleep.

—

“Hey, you need to get up,” someone is softly shaking you awake as the daylight streams in from that same window. “Y/n, get up. Oh my god, it’s worse than I imagined.”

The covers are removed from over your head to reveal Johnny, dumbly staring at the pulsing, aching mass of raw flesh that’s one side of your face. Your hand flies to your cheek out of instinct, inciting a very painful wince from you when you feel how tightly it’s scabbed.

“What are you doing here?” You mumble, tongue heavy with lead and grief in your mouth.

“Aghhh,” a punctuated, loud groan interrupts you and your brother’s conversation, and you push back the comforter to reveal your frien- husband.

“Mark, Mark, are you okay?” You whisper, not wanting to startle him with loud noises.

It takes him a few seconds, a few effortful rises and falls of his chest, but then he gets it out, “I feel fucking awful.”

The swelling on his eye has reduced overnight to the point where he can get both of them open, but everything else has only gotten worse. There’s a spot of blood on the pillowcase from where the cut on his forehead had bled, and through the thin cotton of his sleep shirt you can see the grotesque way his bruises have all darkened. He really should see a doctor, and soon.

“We have to get to Neo City. Dad said you guys got mugged last night? There was blood all over your entryway,” Johnny explains his sudden appearance in your house as he throws open your closet.

“He, he what?” You cower in the middle of your sheets. You’re not sure you’ve heard that right.

Johnny shrugs, pushing your hangers back and forth, “I don’t know, he called asking me if I could bring you two over to the restaurant for the engagement party.”

 _Dad said you guys got mugged last night._ Yeah, we did, and he watched and did nothing. Oh, and by the way, there’s no actual engagement party because Henry and I are no longer engaged for a multitude of very fun reasons!

“Don’t wanna go…” Mark mumbles as he rolls back over and pulls the comforter over his head.

“Are you sure you guys are okay?” Johnny asks with concern as he hands you a dress, hearing just how reluctant Mark is to return to the place of his assault. “I’m sure if I tell dad he can postpone it.”

No, that can’t happen. The consequence of blowing your father off like this is something you don’t want to contemplate. You get out of bed, stiff muscles roaring with effort, and you push him out of your room, “We’ll be down as fast as we can, just give me a few minutes, okay?”

You speed your way through getting ready, a typhoon’s worth of concealer on your face barely hides the redness, a generous side part of your hair barely disguises the open gash, your most elegant white sundress barely plays the part of a blushing bride.

You’re fishing out shoes and a purse from your storage when your heart stills again. Fuck. You’d left your work bag, hijacked ballot inside of it, at the restaurant last night. You can only hope that Ten or someone unknowing had picked it up. You’ll have to do a cursory reconnaissance mission on top of all the bullshit you’re about to go through.

You climb back onto the bed, where Mark still has the covers over his face, and you bend your head down right by his ear, murmuring, “I know you don’t want to go back there, but you know we have to. Do you think you can walk? I’ll be right there with you the whole time.”

He knows as well as you the punishment that would await, and you hear the reluctant exhale from under the cotton.

“Yes.”

“Okay, now roll over so I can do up your face, please.”

It takes a lot more of a concentrated effort to get Mark to look presentable. You go through layers and layers of concealer and foundation, and do manage to get his black eye to look somewhat less devastating. You get him to put on a tank, then an undershirt, then his button down, and the triple layer of fabric masks his torso injuries fairly well. But you know the wounds are peeking through the cracks, just like the heartache is also peeking through.

The one victory is that he is steadier on his feet today, after a night of rest, and he doesn’t lean so heavily on you as you come down the stairs and head out to Johnny’s waiting car. Your brother is observant enough to sense that neither of you are in the mood to discuss what happened or talk about anything, really, so he just turns on the music and lets the two of you drift away in the back seat, clutching at each other’s hands.

By the time you pull up to the restaurant, your heart rate immediately spikes when you see the set of bushes you were forcibly married in, the square of concrete you know is dashed with traces of your blood. The panic brews when you see how many people are already loitering inside, and it explodes in your head when somebody embraces you upon your entrance.

“Y/n!” You pull back from the hug to see the concerned face of your dad. “Oh, I’m so glad to see that you’re okay.”

The terror is instantaneous and consuming when you see just how calculated the expression of distress is on his face, and make no mistake, there Mr. Lee is by the bar, watching the two of you very closely.

“Papa,” you greet him politely, stepping back so he no longer has the range to touch you.

“What happened to you last night is absolutely inexcusable, I’m so sorry,” he whispers, and just for that one moment, you think that he’s going to apologize, tell you that he was as in shock as you were last night and made the wrong choice. But instead, he picks up a mimosa glass and gestures to the crowd, “Attention, attention everyone! My daughter is here!”

You look around at a swath of friendly and hostile faces, Johnny sans Wendy for obvious reasons, Haechan, Henry and his father, all the others, and you steel your grip onto Mark’s so he steadies you out.

“Thank you, everyone, for being here this morning. This was supposed to be an engagement brunch. But a harrowing event happened to me and my family last night, and I wanted all of us to come together and support each other in this time,” your father begins his puffed up, falsified speech, and everyone starts to buzz with confusion at the change of plans.

You meet glances with Henry from across the room and he mouths a word so clearly he may as well have shouted it. _Bitch._

Your father takes a deep breath, then he solemnly announces, “Last night, my daughter and Mark were on their way home from a secret elopement when they were attacked in a random act of savagery.”

There’s a collective gasp from everyone in the crowd, you and Mark included as you look at each other in dismay. This is how it’s going to be, huh? How your father and Mr. Lee would escape responsibility for what they’ve done to you? By framing you two as some sort of lovesick Romeo and Juliet that just happened to be at the wrong place at the wrong time?

“Rest assured, we are on the lookout for the perpetrators, but it would please me greatly if we took this time for support, healing, and congratulations. It is not the ideal circumstances for me, but my only daughter is married now and we would like to celebrate that.”

All of the women that are there immediately swarm your father, cooing and sighing over what an ordeal he must’ve been through in the past 24 hours. But you’re seething. Not the ideal circumstances for _him_? What about you? You were married in a parking lot in your navy work dress, literally the exact opposite of everything you’ve ever dreamed your wedding would be. Not to mention the whole terrorized and held at gunpoint thing!

You feel Mark’s hand detaching from yours, and glance over to see Mr. Lee with his hands on his son’s shoulders, squeezing hard on a particular set of bruises that you know are on the top of Mark’s clavicle as he guides him over to a different group of people. You don’t give a fuck anymore, so you send off a text to one of the doctors you know at MGH to come by and check your best friend out at the house when you’re removed from this farce. Your father had been okay with his friend brandishing a weapon at the two of you, had been legitimately peachy with it. You can’t get over that.

Johnny is by your side in an instant, hissing, “Married? You guys got _married_? What were you thinking?”

Your brother has been fed the lies and bought into them, hook line and sinker. He’s the closest one to you in here, so everyone else is going to be similarly convinced. You won’t ever be able to reveal the truth.

So you lie to Johnny, “I don’t know, we wanted to do it before Henry.”

“I didn’t even know you and M were together like that,” he looks back and forth from you to your friend, trying to recall any moments you’ve shared in the past that would’ve clued him in.

“John, I love Mark.”

It’s true and undeniable, you love Mark, like he is one of your own, like he is the family you’re supposed to have. It’s not in the way that Johnny’s referencing, but that’s not something for you to tell.

“I just can’t wrap my head around this,” Johnny sighs, running his hand through his hair. “You were supposed to be engaged today, not married, just what is going on?”

“I protected my family,” you assert. “I did what I had to.”

Johnny contemplates your phrasing as the restaurant’s front door opens. There are too many people for you to see who it is clearly, but you catch a woman’s long hair and a familiar gold necklace.

“Was that Stephanie?”

“No, I didn’t see,” Johnny shakes his head, and he shifts in front of you, blocking your vision so you can stay focused on the conversation. “But you guys are crazy. Are you sure you’re okay?”

“I thought it was her,” you try to look past him and don’t catch anything.

He pats your cheek in concern. “Between the other day and now, I just want to make sure my baby sister is okay.”

“I’m fine, John. Don’t worry,” you placate him with the answer he wants to hear. “How is Wendy?”

As he begins to talk your ear off about the baby, you see Mark and Haechan talking stiffly in the corner. They don’t notice you watching them, but you can hear how Haechan’s voice is a bit agitated as their back and forth goes on.

You pick up a very pointed, _“_ You could’ve told me,” from Haechan but you don’t think much of what they’re up to because you’re much more preoccupied with your father sneaking away into a back corner of the restaurant.

Tucking yourself in between a towering stack of chairs, you listen in on the surreptitious conversation, first registering a female voice you can’t pinpoint, “Eugene, what the hell were you thinking?”

From your hiding spot, if you crane your neck to see who the woman is, you’ll be completely exposed, so you wedge yourself further in and hope their conversation will give you the context you need.

“It’s under control now, the truth won’t ever get out,” Mr. Lee grumbles, but clearly the mystery woman is not satisfied.

“No, but _a gun_?”

Your father’s evenhanded voice enters the foray, “She’s right, I thought we agreed the kids would never see that part of it."

That part of it? The brutal beatings, the weapons, the sheer awfulneess that you’d had to experience? That is a bigger part of whatever your father’s dealing in?

Eugene's blasé tone that tells you he’s not at all apologetic for what he’s done, “That’s the only way they would understand the consequences of their actions, you know that’s the truth Herbert. If I hadn’t struck the fear of life or death into them, they would’ve run and sold us out in an instant!”

The woman cuts him off with a very exasperated, “But having Henry marry y/n was a sure way to keep his fortune under our control!”

Under their control to do what?!

“Mr. Lau understands that it is in his own best interest to continue funding our venture,” your father reminds her, after letting out a deep, contemplative sigh. “You’ve just made it so much harder on us, Eugene.”

“No, you can’t bitch at me about this,” Mr. Lee snaps.

“I—,”

He starts ranting then, and you have no idea how the other partygoers haven’t picked up on the decibel of his ire, “I have done so much for you without getting anything in return. I was the one who had the contact in Honduras, I’ve helmed the company publicly while you ran off and dallied in politics. Lest you forget who was the one who went out— after that girl died, mind you, when everyone was on alert — and rigged a gubernatorial election for you. Me.”

It’s just question after question after question for you now. Namely, what the hell is he talking about, who the hell is the contact in Honduras, beyond that who the hell is that girl who died, and why, oh, why the hell did they have to rig the election? What the fuck is happening?! You thought it was just the ballots but it’s clearly so much more.

Your father’s politician voice comes out, “And I’ve appreciated that, Eugene.”

“But the hard work I’ve done for my family line can’t be destroyed by my son’s mistakes,” the words come hissing out from in between his teeth, deadly and venomous. “Sometimes I think it would be easier if he just died, I’d been ready for that yesterday. But if I am to keep him as my heir, he needs a woman befitting of his status. Y/n is the only one who can match that. She’ll cover for him forever. She lied right to our faces last night, said he’d been in love with her their whole lives.”

It would be hilarious in almost any other situation, the fact that you’d used Mr. Lee’s words to your advantage once with Henry. _When we’ve both graduated, and CEO Lee is looking for someone to marry his son, he’ll look to me first._ You’d said them as a flippant defense, a way to get Henry off your back as you had with the other advances from men you’d dodged. But there was no way for you to know then the kind of situation you’d be in now, how grotesquely true your words would become.

“Okay, you know I have no qualms with y/n being with Mark, because he’s always treated her well,” your father tries to placate Mr. Lee’s growing indignation, “I very clearly conceded to your request last night. But so what if the girl Mark’s interested in is not at y/n’s level? Not many girls can match up to her.”

There’s a disbelieving league, one quarter note of pure disgust, “You cannot seriously be this stupid, Herbert.”

“What are you saying, Eugene?”

“I didn’t just send my nephews to teach Mark a lesson for being caught with a girl,” Mr. Lee hisses, absolute revulsion front loading into his tone, “I was giving him my final warning. Because I caught him with Harrison Lee’s son.” ****

And like that, you discover that Haechan isn’t just Mark’s other best friend.

You suppose it should’ve been obvious to you over the years, but they’ve apparently done a fantastic job of keeping it so low key. Both of them taking you to prom but dancing with each other all night. The way they’d so sweetly cried while hugging each other before leaving for college.

Those trips between Georgetown and Harvard, trips out to San Francisco, Haechan taking a job on the east coast just to be closer to Mark. The way Mark got flustered when you asked him if he disappeared from your grad party. How upset he was at the prospect of an arranged marriage. All those disgusting insults the thugs had hurled at him last night, how Mark had desperately tried to conceal the truth.

One little slip of paper reading, _to be with my best friend, for real._

You thought it’d been weird, for Haechan to be here at what was supposed to be your engagement party, when none of your nor Johnny’s other friends were invited. It’s clear to you now, that this had been orchestrated to be as painful and public as possible. Mark’s father has made sure to place Haechan front and center to witness the announcement of your surprise marriage. At least he didn’t have to witness the actual deed, like Jaehyun had, but that’s really no consolation prize.

What better way for Mr. Lee to secure his family’s legacy and public reputation by marrying his son to the daughter of the most powerful man in Massachusetts? Whatever enigmatic rumors that have apparently been swirling about Mark — ones that as a father he shouldn’t be ashamed of — would be put to rest.

You’ve inadvertently given them the escape route they need to move past Mr. Lee’s random act of terror. Your close relationship with Mark over the years can be easily spun into a love story, such as they had by detailing your marriage as a surprise elopement. Your willingness to do anything for him was put on display the moment you’d shielded his body with yours. Mr. Lee’d said it himself, if he didn’t strike the fear of life or death into you, there’s no way you wouldn’t blab the truth. And you’re sure if you dare to reveal the reality of it all, you’ll both end up with bullets in your hearts.

Feeling dizzy with emotion, you step away from the stack of chairs without a word, without a care of getting caught, and move into the alcove where the dirty dishes are kept. Pressing your forehead into the tile, you try to calm your frantic breathing as you piece together the act of the play you’re on, the act where you live together happily, falsely ever after.

Haechan’s father is a well known author, his family isn’t associated with the political world, isn’t connected to S&L in any way. But you just know Haechan will be trotted out to any future events as a reminder to Mark of what he needs to do. And while you no longer have to marry Henry, the distress this has caused you is no viable alternative. How can you and Mark even look at each other the same way after this? How can you live in the same house without a graveyard of suffering enveloping you?

“Y/n.”

You glance up from your grief spiral, prepared to smile and receive a guest when you see a familiar bartender. “Ten?”

He has a tray of drinks in his hand, but is skilled enough to reach around the bar and produce your purse. “You left this here yesterday.”

You don’t even get a chance to thank him before he’s striding back out into the belly of the restaurant. You look down and your work bag is very conspicuously unzipped, recognizable piece of cardstock sat upon the rest of your personal effects.

Pinned to the top of the ballot is a square card with a number on it, and a note scrawled in Ten’s handwriting.

_At eleven tomorrow, find a public phone. Call the number on the card._

**tbc.**

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> well hello! i finally sat down for the entire day ....lol what is work.... and re did the ending of this story to better tell the narrative i planned (also made a tiny tweak in the title that i love so much more). i think the moral of the story is that my pea brain can only focus on one fic at a time and i was just so focused on at the heart of it all i couldn't finish this one. so to make up for it, i'm going to post the final 5 chapters of this every 2-3 days coming up, to make up for the month i made you wait.
> 
> as always, thanks for reading and hope you're staying safe xo


	7. avarice

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> That’s an address not far from where your office is, probably a fifteen minute walk that you cut in half by speed walking for your life through the Boston sidewalks. You can’t take the mystery and contemplation anymore. If you’re walking into a trap, so be it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> tw: short mention of s*icide (very brief, one sentence)

You think about that business card all night, through the rest of the party and dinner and later, Dr. Park coming by to check on Mark. Even the relief of finding out that he won’t have to go to the hospital is overshadowed by the mysterious message.

You’re up at the crack of dawn the next morning from your sleep spot outside Mark’s door, Mark snoring away in his bed behind it, and you anxiously pace away in the kitchen as the hours tick by. At 10:55, he is still sound asleep, so you text him to tell him you’re going out for coffee, and then you’re off.

There’s a pay phone on the corner across the street from the library, so you waste no time in going right there, shoving a few coins into the slot as you pull out the card from your pocket.A jittery finger taps out the ten digits, and the other line only rings once before a cool female voice answers.

“Hello.”

“Hello?” You reply tentatively, unsure of what you’re supposed to do. There hadn’t been any other instructions.

“68 Newbury, apartment 2B,” the voice says, and then the line goes silent.

That’s an address not far from where your office is, probably a fifteen minute walk that you cut in half by speed walking for your life through the Boston sidewalks. You can’t take the mystery and contemplation anymore. If you’re walking into a trap, so be it.

68 Newbury turns out to be a refurbished apartment lofted above a pet store, and a woman with a severe blond bob greets you once you’ve opened the door.

“Hello, Ms. Suh,” you recognize her voice from the phone. “This way.”

She knows your name, so she’s obviously been expecting you. She leads you through the reception area into a back room outfitted with two couches, and she gestures for you to sit. You lower yourself onto the grey furniture, and a tall blonde man walks in after she’s left.

“Hello, Ms. Suh.”

“Just y/n is fine,” you say regretfully, small spike of nausea ingested at the sound of your father’s name. You’ve never seen this man before, though he seems friendly and approachable. “I’m sorry, am I in the wrong place? I’m supposed to be meeting my acquaintance Ten.”

“The man you’ve been in contact with is actually Chittaphon Leechaiyapornkul, a CI. I’m Agent Lucas Wong, with the FBI,” he flashes you his badge, the shining logo of the Federal Bureau of Investigation evident on the card.

That spike of nausea becomes a hurricane.

“CI?”

“Confidential informant. S&L Corporation is officially under FBI investigation,” he reveals, settling onto the couch opposite of you and crossing his legs, undoubtedly preparing for a lengthy discussion.

You open and close your mouth a half dozen times, trying to force your mouth into saying something. You must be paralyzed by the pure shock electrified through your body, this was not the kind of trap you were expecting.

“So you’ve brought me here to question me about an investigation into what exactly?” You try to project some confidence. “I only became involved with the company slightly over a month ago.”

You can’t be dragged into whatever this is, especially when you feel like you’ve been walking blind for the past few weeks. You know you’ve seen the trucks in Seaport, and you have the ballot at home, but you’re not giving up anything that can incriminate you before you know what’s going on.

“An investigation into S&L’s drug trafficking.”

You choke violently, the very small bit of your remaining sanity evaporating, “Excuse me, what?”

You’d expected him to discuss details of electoral fraud, of hidden or bought votes, considering what Eugene had inadvertently revealed at the restaurant yesterday. Never in your life would you think the words _drug trafficking_ would come out of his mouth.

Agent Wong nods seriously, “This has been an operation underway for a years, we’ve had CIs like Ten and moles galore in the company, but we’ve never had a true in to the big shots until now.”

“Because of me,” you whisper. With the element of hindsight, you realize you’ve blabbed this all to Ten, who’s probably run straight to Lucas with it all.

“Because of you. We’ve never had a target this accessible.”

“I, I had no idea they were trafficking drugs,” you have to desperately defend yourself, because if you’re here because they intend to charge you with the others, that’s not fair. “I know that seems hard to believe…”

But Lucas reaches across the space between you to put a comforting hand on your knee. “No, not hard to believe at all. We’ve been watching you and your family, y/n. It’s been a very, very undercover white-collar enterprise."

He hands you a file folder, which feels like a threatening bomb when cradled in your hands, and then begins to explain,

"The gist of it is this. There have been a large number of distributors trafficking exorbitant amounts of methamphetamine laced marijuana to colleges and other education institutions in the greater Boston area. We believe that this drug was chosen since the demand level and addiction potential are both so high, it can lead to immense profitability.

"We’re still trying to piece together all of the details and major players, but it is believed that Eugene Lee is helming most of the drug import and export operations. He has had international drug contacts in Honduras for some time now. Herbert Suh has been acting as the public, clean-nosed face of a legitimate business front. That is perhaps why you could never really grasp exactly what S&L did as a company.”

It all makes sense now, the numbers that didn’t add up, the fluctuations in income and missing funds. Why you couldn’t figure out what exactly everyone has been doing for all these years, why your father begged you to keep your nose out of the financials during your internship. S&L is a sham, a front, just a dummy corporation to conceal the undercover dealings your father and Mark’s had apparently been dabbling in.

Your whole life has been funded by tainted money. Your Hamptons house, your Turks house, your Harvard tuition, your fancy clothes. The extravagant birthday parties, the vacations, literally everything had been funded by your father, the drug lord.

“Yes,” you breathe out in awe. “I never had a fucking clue.”

“So we’re asking you,” he begins, but you know now where it’s going so you finish it for him.

“To narc.”

The corner of his lip curves up at your bluntness, but he goes about the proper explanation, “To gather information for us in exchange for immunity in the investigation. We have the location of the main drug stockpile in Seaport, where all the international shipments come into port, and, like I mentioned earlier, most of the broad strokes of the operation. We need the insider details. The federal prosecutors want to go ahead with an indictment in three weeks before the first set of public caucuses.”

Three weeks until your family is publicly destroyed. Three weeks is absolutely nothing. Your father is out there shaking hands and kissing babies on his quest to become president all while trafficking drugs through Boston universities.

You immediately go into business mode, the plotting already afoot, “Am I allowed to negotiate terms myself? I don’t have a lawyer.”

Though you’d never run into any legal problems during your life, you knew that your dad retained Maxwell Shim for your use as well. After his willingness to conspire with your father, so much for him. You’re out here on your own with no time to consult anyone.

“You may.”

“If I do this, can I guarantee immunity for a group of people?” you question.

“You can only guarantee immunity so far as they’re not directly involved in what we’re investigating,” Lucas informs you.

You shake your head because that’s not enough. “No. Full immunity, no questions asked. Otherwise I’m not cooperating and you may as well arrest me with the lot of them.”

This is the fiercest, best you, and Lucas has to relent, “Okay. We will do our best to guarantee full immunity.”

“Minhyung Lee, Haechan Lee, John Suh, Wendy Shon,” your best friend and his person plus your brother and his. And yours, “and Jeffrey Jung, Jr.”

“Done.”

Once you’ve confirmed you’ve gotten protection for the most important people in your life, you take out your phone and pull up a picture, “If you're right about this all, there’s more than just the weed. Look at this.”

As Lucas scrutinizes the image you’ve showed him, you tick off the first of your duties, “The drugs were shipped in Tiffany & Co. boxes, am I right?”

“Right, they were all stamped with the logo.”

You zoom in on the picture for him, so he can see exactly what is printed on the ballot. “I found that in one of those boxes in our locked archives. That would be election fraud, or racketeering, or something of the sort, right?”

You know Lucas is trying to keep it professional, but the gleam in his eye is hard to deny. This would be another devastating set of charges. “Do you have this on your person?”

“It’s at my house,” you affirm. “But I only took the one. I’d have to go back to the archives and grab them.”

“Do you have anything else?’’

“Some files a financial analyst put together digging up the budget discrepancies I’d noticed, which are probably the result of keeping the drug operations under wraps. I haven’t even looked at them yet. I think that’s all I have physically.”

He jots down a few notes onto his tablet, then he reassures you, “We will offer you security once the indictments are issued, witness protection if necessary. All that will be hashed out with our affairs team after this meeting.”

You let out an exhale, “Alright.”

He holds out a hand for you to shake, “Ms. Suh, thank you for your cooperation.”

“It’s not Ms. Suh anymore, not really. It’s y/n. Or Mrs. Lee,” you murmur sadly, the first time you’ve recognized your new identity out loud. There’s one more reluctant piece of hurtful information you have to pass on, “Minhyung Lee and I may be considered married in the eyes of the law. I’m not sure if there will be an issue there, but I would like to let you know that he is my spouse. Done under duress.”

You don’t know where Ten had disappeared to that night, whether or not he would've been able to save you, but it’s too late to wonder about that now. You feel your age, twenty one and despondent, and perhaps Lucas sees it too. He reaches out to hug you, gently patting your head when you rest it on his shoulder.

“Thank you, y/n. You won’t be alone anymore. We’ve got you from now on.”

Your head is replaying the same mantra, _S &L’s drug trafficking, S&L’s drug trafficking, S&L’s drug trafficking, _that you don’t even see Mark slumped on a barstool when you make your way back inside your house.

“Where were you?”

“Oh my god!” You yelp in surprise at the sound of his voice, face softening when you see that he’s feeling well enough to come downstairs. “Hey, good that you’re up. Do you want me to look at your eye?”

“Were you out with another guy?” he questions you immediately.

Your jaw drops, purse hanging limply from your hand. “What?”

“You can’t do that, we’re married now,” he bites out from behind a close-lipped, badly masked sneer. “It’s not fair. If you’re out with someone who isn’t me then I want to know.”

He has negative idea you’ve just been interrogated by the FBI and roped into investigating your own family. He’s immediately jumped to the conclusion that you have a secret boyfriend, something that shouldn’t have bothered him before, but bothers him now because….?

“I wasn’t out with someone,” you defend yourself, though you technically were with Lucas, that’s not what Mark is talking about. “I went for a walk and got coffee because I didn’t want to disturb you!”

“Because you only think about what’s best for me, right?” He laughs bitterly, dropping his head into his hands as he groans.

So that’s what this is about, huh, why he’s suddenly so curious as to what you’re doing away from the house? It’s because he wants to know if he can do it, too. Because there’s someone out there who’s captured his heart who's decidedly you, and he might not ever be able to see him again.

“We should talk about this, Mark,” you venture. “We haven’t, yet.”

“You think I _want_ to talk about this?” He’s pushing for a fight now, raising his voice first. “You think I want to go back and go over just how nicely you ruined my life?”

“Ruined?” You stutter out, because you and he had both gone through the same thing that night. “You think I ruined your life?”

“Yeah,” he nods his head rapidly. “I do.”

He saw how crazed his own dad was. Maybe he’s still in shock, or deep into denial, but Mr. Lee had really been prepared to kill you both if you didn’t do what he said. After your conversation with Lucas about how deeply Mr. Lee’s been involved in the trafficking ring, after the exact confirmation had come out of his father’s mouth, you’re completely sure he or his dangerous nephews would’ve ended Mark on the spot if you hadn’t happened to be around. He'd said it himself, s _ometimes I think it would be easier if he just died._

“Mark, if I’d left you there, they would’ve killed you,” you murmur softly, not wanting to remind him of that fact but needing to out of necessity and understanding.

He opens his mouth to retort but can’t find anything in him to sling back, perhaps recognizing that you’ve only spoken truth. That doesn’t mean he has to like it, and instead, he immediately gets up from the table and starts stalking his way back upstairs.

“Mark, Mark! Come back so we can talk,” you plead after him, after your best friend, the boy you’ve grown up with. But all you’re met with is the slam of his bedroom door.

—

“Tell me again why I’m here,” Mark grumbles as he sidesteps your third attempt at tying his tie for him.

You grab his shoulder with a stern grip, holding him in place finally so you can get it done. “Because the Boston Globe wants to interview us about our marriage.”

“I’m a trophy husband, there’s no need for me to be in this,” he slumps into your office chair, uncooperative with the mood.

“Mark, come on.”

“No, I don’t want to.”

“It’s only a few pictures and questions—,”

“This is all your fault, you know,” he mumbles out from behind his hands on his face. “If you’d just left me there—,”

This argument is roaring its ugly head once again, as it had every time the two of you had had a petty squabble the past two weeks. “If I just left you there you would’ve died!”

“You don’t know that!” He retorts, indignant at your assumption of his danger.

“I do." Because you do know what your fathers are really capable of, though you can’t tell him in any terms, explicit or vague. Since you and Lucas had joined forces, you’d wanted to blab about it all to Mark, but the FBI agent had advised you to keep it under wraps. The less people that knew, the better.

“Are you going to bring up that fantasy in each time we fight?” Mark sneers, exasperated with the way you’re defending yourself.

“It’s not a fantasy—,” you start, the tension already escalating to an unnecessary level, but then you’re interrupted by a knock on your glass door.

“Hey, is this a bad time?”

You quickly paste on a composed smile and direct it towards the reporter who’s stuck his head inside your office, “No, not at all, please come in, Kyungsoo.”

He walks in, lugging his camera equipment and laptop bag, and he’s followed by Rosé with her equipment as well. She drops it on your floor at the sight of her former friend, and she happily pulls him into a hug. “Mark! Congratulations! I was so surprised at the announcement but I should’ve known you two would end up together.”

Mark shoots you this dirty, dirty look and mumbles, “Thanks.”

A lurker is visible by the exit to your office then, so you politely remove yourself from the set-up chaos, “Excuse me, I’ll be right back,” and make your way out into the deserted hall.

Once you spot the janitorial uniform from around the corner, you duck behind the paper shredder and pull out the file folder you’d stashed there before Mark arrived. You glance behind you, no one has followed you out or watched you go, so you’re good to do this.

“Hey, Lucas.”

“Hey, you okay?” The man looks over your shoulder to see the commotion in your office. “Anything I should know?”

“Yeah, the Boston Globe fluff piece that I told you about." You’d remind him, you'd given him a list of all your scheduled activities up until the indictment. “That’s okay, right?”

“Yes, keep to your normal schedule.”

You glance around one more time, and once you’re satisfied with your empty surroundings, pass off the file. “Here are all of the files that have been uploaded onto the servers in the past two years, it was all I had access to. I’ve specifically targeted Matthew Kim’s files, with a few additional ones coming from Henry Lau’s computer. I’m working on the encrypted stuff, my associate in accounting should be done with it soon.”

He skims through the printed pages, then puts the flash drive in his pants pocket, satisfied. He thinks for a second, then adds on,“It would be really helpful if we could get that box of ballots. So we have concrete proof of election fraud in addition to the trafficking.”

You’ve been to the basement half a dozen times and still haven’t been able to pick it up. “I’m working on it. I don’t know if someone is getting suspicious but there’s been more people than usual loitering around the archives entrance.”

“Okay, be careful. And let us know if you need our help,” he taps you on your arm reassuringly, then disappears around the corner with his janitorial cart.

“Y/n?” You jump in surprise at the sound of your name, whirling around to see your brother staring curiously at the empty bit of hallway that Lucas was just in.

“Who was that?”

You brush that question off, because Johnny needs to be out of the loop even more than Mark. “What are you doing here?”

“I was contacted for the interview as well. Something about the full family experience?”

“The full…?” You start to wonder out loud, then you look behind Johnny and see that there’s one additional person in your office. You stalk your way back over and slam your door open wildly, greeting said person with a harsh, “Papa.”

Your father glances up from contemplating your gilded nameplate. “Hello, y/n.”

“You weren’t supposed to be back from canvassing with volunteers in Iowa until tomorrow,” you point out dully, though your heart is sprinting in anxiety at the narrow way he’d missed your rendezvous with Lucas.

“I thought I’d come back for this. I’ll be heading back out tomorrow.”

You need to get him out of here. “This was supposed to be an interview regarding my and Mark’s marriage.”

“Wouldn’t it be nice to have the whole family together for once?” He pleads with you in a saccharinely sweet way, disgust curling into your throat. “Plus this pictorial would look fantastic for the campaign.”

“Ah, hello John,” he finally notices your brother, allowing you to slip away to approach Kyungsoo. Even if your father had pulled strings to get you all together for this, you need to undo his work and do it fast.

“Only pictures today,” you utter lowly, so only Kyungsoo can hear.

The reporter's eyes widen. “Ms. Suh?”

If your dad’s here, that means you can’t answer anything honestly. He’ll be breathing down your neck and you’ll be forced to continue spinning your web of lies. You cannot have that out for public consumption across the country. “Send me the questions separately, and I’ll answer them for you. Please.”

You must reek of desperation because he silently nods and fumbles for his phone, starting up a fake phone call, “Hello? Editor Lee?” You turn to Johnny, pulling a fabricated _I don’t know what’s going on_ face, and he shrugs.

“Yes, I understand. Right away,” Kyungsoo continues to falsify his conversation before he ‘hangs up’ and addresses your father.“Change of plans, editor called and wants to just do pictures today since I need to go out for another story.”

Your father doesn’t suspect a thing. Though the whole ordeal is still quite awkward and uncomfortable, it’s easier to stand there in silence and get moved around by Kyungsoo and Rosé than try and formulate diplomatic answers about your horrid personal life. Johnny and Mark have a less than pleasant time as well, Rosé has to yell at the three of you multiple times to smile more because you can’t muster up the emotion. You finish the shoot idly hoping they’ll edit out the scars that are still visible on your and Mark’s faces.

Is this why your mother had gone? Was she sick and tired of being posed by the people around her? Was she scared that her children would end up the same way? Would she be sad to see you and Johnny here like this? You feel more like her than ever.

After they’re satisfied with the shots they’ve taken, Kyungsoo and Rosé take their equipment out of your office to pack up, Johnny steps out to take a phone call, and that leaves you and Mark together alone with your father. This brings up an overflowing trough of fear into the pit of your soul, and you know Mark feels the same.

“How are things going?” Your father asks as he sits in your chair, a gesture loaded with insult.

“Work is work,” you answer for both you and Mark, and your father waves your response off.

“No, I mean between the two of you! How is married life?”

“It’s fine, sir,” Mark bites out, trying to keep his cool.

“Great, papa,” you answer in the way you hope he expects, diplomatic, prim, and proper. “Everything is coming along nicely.”

“You getting ready to give me some real grandbabies, son?” He fixes Mark with a pointed stare and you physically have to stop your mouth from gaping. You cannot help the full on revulsion, for the not-at-all subtle dig at Johnny, but what follows is such a harrowing symphony of thoughts your nails nearly puncture through your clenched fist.

Obviously this will never happen, not now, not ever. Even if you had more than platonic feelings for each other, your friendship has already started to fracture. You can barely have a civil conversation right now, if you walk into a room Mark walks right out, and you sleep every night on the floor outside his door to make sure he’s okay in his bed. But this is something you hadn’t even _thought_ about.

If the indictment failed, and your father continued to roam free in the world, would he seriously force the two of you to have a child? Force you to bring up and indoctrinate an innocent life into this horrid family? You’re already stressed enough as it is thinking about your niece or your nephew growing up with such a nefarious grandfather, you can't imagine what'd it be like if it was your own child.

You nearly collapse out of bewilderment, but your husband stands steady on his feet, “Right on, sir.”

“Good man,” your father gets up and slaps Mark broadly across the back in approval. “I’ve gotta run to a meeting, but we should do family dinner soon.”

“Yes, sir,” Mark replies in unison with your, “Yes, papa," and the older man strides out towards the door.

As soon as he’s gone from your office, you gasp in relief, “I’m sorry about the grandkids comment.”

“It’s fine,” Mark replies, body and face rigid with stress, and though today had been an example of your new normal, you can’t help your concern.

“Is there something wrong?”

“No.”

“There clearly is.”

“Oh yeah?” He shouts, catching you off guard and sending you stumbling against your desk. “Since you know me so well, right?”

“What are you talking about?” You don’t want to fight with him, you don’t. Fighting with Mark is literally the worst.

“You think you know exactly what you’re doing, making the big sacrifices, sticking your nose in everything. With John, with me.”

“Mark, you could’ve—,”

“Yeah, I get it, I could’ve died. And honestly, sometimes that’s what I would’ve rather done,” he admits tersely, driving a galaxy’s worth of hurt into a stake and pushing it right through your chest. He catches the way you freeze then rubs at his head in embarrassment. “Ah, I’ll take an Uber home first.”

He stalks out of your room and you watch him leave the floor before you collapse onto your desk.

You haven’t had one moment to rest, one moment to contemplate your own feelings, so how could you have ever truly unpacked Mark’s. You’ve been unfair to him. At the core of it, he’s a twenty one year old kid, just like you are. A twenty one year old kid who’s had his foundation completely ripped apart, the building of him collapsing into the unknown, who’s had the love of his own life brutally hewn away.

You suppose you’ve done him a favor by helping him keep his life, his comment aside, but is it really a _life?_ Though Mark wanted to grow old with you, he’d never wanted to do it in this way. Even if your father and his are appropriately punished for their crimes, the two of you will always be looking over your shoulder, will always have your days tinged with that fear. And even if you are freed from the prisons that are your families, and are able to divorce and be freely with who you want to be, will your friendship ever make it through this ravine of turmoil you’ve stumbled into?

You don’t know, but you can’t risk that possibility.

So, you dial a number, and start to leave a message, “I’m sorry to be calling you like this, but we need to talk,” which erodes in your throat when you hear something from the hallway.

You click the phone dead as Mr. Lee divulges, “I’ve heard the young mistress has been poking around the archives.”

He and your father are having this talk in broad daylight, but for the other employees it’s nothing out of place. The company owner and the COO discussing matters isn’t an unusual sight, and no one is close enough to listen in except for you, where you’re hidden in the shadows of the executive floor’s sculpture.

Your father shakes his head, “She doesn’t suspect anything.”

“Are you sure about that?”

“She and your son are very fastidiously keeping up the façade of their married life, so what are you saying?”

It is then Mr. Lee realizes how publicly they’re talking about this subject, and he brings his face closer in to hiss, “I mean, we saw how gullible your son was when he smoked that weed without a care. You and I both know he did, he didn’t just have a _drunken accident._ And we agreed we needed a unsuspicious figurehead that wasn't either of us, he would’ve been perfect! He'd would've been so easy to manipulate as CEO, our dealings would've gone on right under his nose.

"Lau got the Kim kid to try the same thing with y/n and she didn't bite, hence why we _settled on John_. I never got why you were okay with the stunt they pulled, even if he did have a kid on the way!”

Oh my god. Having Johnny take over the company wasn’t about the fact that he was the eldest son. That was their plan all along, to have him in place as a puppet to control, as a fall man if things were to go wrong. They’d tested you, too, by having Matthew bring you to that SME formal. But while Johnny had been a tad naive, gullible, even (through no fault of his own), you’d blown Matthew off hard, didn’t even let him get close. If you’d gone with him back to his apartment, he would’ve attempted to get you to try the drugs as well, and who knows how things would've gone.

You can’t record them, because of the inane consent laws of the state, but you won’t forget. Thank god you’d been able to keep Johnny out of this, that you’d crossed paths with Lucas when you did.

“You know this company is all about keeping up appearances for the sake of our work! She’s an articulate, beautiful Harvard graduate, she’s better than John in every way. You have to admit she is the best face the company could have right now,” your father is simmering with displeasure at being questioned, not caring at all that he’s putting his son down when he says, “It doesn’t matter that they pulled a fast one on me by having y/n take over, because we should’ve considered her in the first place. She’s just as blind as him now, things are chugging along as they always are. But who knows? We could use a mind like hers.”

Your stomach rolls with nausea, at the idea of being recruited into their little operation of horrors. This is something you're going to need to steel yourself for, the chance that your father will tempt you into joining him.

Mr. Lee groans, “You’re being purposefully naive about your kids. The sibling bond is strong, Herbert. Think about why I’ve done this.”

“Eugene—,”

Mr. Lee’s voice dips to the lowest pitch he’s used so far, but he may as well be shouting into a megaphone directed right into your ear, “To protect Tiffany, you know it is. She took the fall, so I have to atone.”

There’s that name again, the first time it’s used in reference to an actual person and not just the jewelry box shipments of illicit drugs. Just who exactly is Tiffany? Why had Mr. Lee done all these things for her? You don’t know very much about Mark’s absent biological mother, but you’re fairly certain that her name hadn’t been Tiffany.

“Don’t you think y/n would do the same for John?” Mr. Lee asks the rhetorical question, rhetorical because all three of you know what the answer is.

Your father chooses to deny it, out of blunt ignorance or what you don’t know. “She wouldn’t. She might be looking out for her brother, but her loyalty is to me.”

And that's his final say on the matter because the two men go their separate ways at that moment, leaving you with no more evidence to collect. How awful is he, your own father, hoping that you'll turn a blind eye and cast your own brother aside like he's used scum? It's unfathomable, really.

As you leave the office building, you can’t help but think the joke’s on him.

—

When your doorbell rings two afternoon later, you don’t need to see who it is before you’re hollering, “Mark! Someone’s here for you.”

You throw open the door to reveal Jaehyun, in his DC Sport & Health tank top and running shorts. You haven’t seen him since he was across from you on the fire escape, and you're pleased to find that the cuts on his face from that night have healed nicely. You're also pleased to soak in the way he’s looking at you from the bottom of your stairs, and well, you want to press pause on that for just one second more.

Mark shuffles up next to you, smile not even cracking his face when he sees his friend. “What’s up?”

“Guy’s night,” Jaehyun breezes, hands on his hips. “My place.”

“I can’t,” Mark sighs forlornly.

“Why not?” You ask him, like you’re the reason he thinks you can’t go.

He instantly brightens, tiny grin now tugging at his lips, “I can?”

“Sticking my nose in once again,” you tease him, tugging at the hem of his shirt, your way of saying sorry. “Go, be careful. Don’t get caught.”

He completely transforms then, giggling happily as he puts on his sneakers and runs out after Jaehyun. The two of them chatter on about something as they walk to the car as you watch them fondly, happy that you were able to make this happen for him.

Though the sun is high in the sky, you pour yourself a hefty glass of wine, flopping onto your couch and turning on some mindless _Real Housewives_ re-run. You haven’t had a silent house in god knows how long, and you can feel the relaxation creep up on you. There’s no one here, no Mark, no family, none of your dad’s people coming back for check-ins, it’s just you. You pour another glass of wine, and another, and it’s not long before you’re tipsy and yelling at Luann de Lesseps on the screen.

You might be the happiest person on the planet right now. Well, save for Mark.

Only half an hour into your me time, your doorbell rings again. You groan for a solid ten seconds before swinging your legs and getting up, stumbling a bit when the alcohol hits you all at once.You swing the door open without a care and slosh a little bit of wine onto your silk robe when you see Jaehyun at the bottom of your stairs, again doing that same stare from earlier.

“Did you forget something?” You ask in concern. “I said they can stay out until the sun starts to go down.”

“Nope,” he shakes his head, hands in his pockets. “The kiddos can watch themselves.”

Okay, that means everything had gone off without a hitch and Mark and Haechan are alone together at Jaehyun’s apartment. But that still doesn’t explain what he’s doing here at your house.

“What is your husband missing out on on this fine evening?” He cheekily inquires, shuffling one of his feet on the sidewalk.

“Drinking some wine,” you answer, raising your glass towards him. Then, fuck it, you lift a casual shoulder. “Would you like to drink wine?”

It is a blatant summons, though he’s clearly come here with the intentions of being invited inside. You want to have Jaehyun in your home with only you, and you want him to want that too.

“Sure.”

He enters your home and neatly lines up his sneakers beside a pair of your heels. It’s a charming little side by side image that gnaws at a morsel of your heart when you see the contrast of Mark’s shoes tossed everywhere on the floor.You busy yourself with getting him the alcohol instead of letting your tipsy feelings overwhelm you; you pull out your finest white wine and a nice glass and nearly drop it all when you turn back around.

This cocky fucker. He’s done it without thinking, but as he’s leans on your kitchen island to look at something on his phone, the exact stance he's in has caused the collar of his tank to collapse, giving you an eyeful of the expanse of his bare chest.

“A little modesty, please?” You blurt out, half as a joke and half so you don’t stroke out because of him.

“Sorry,” he covers himself up with a sheepish, knowing grin.

You pour him a glass, top off yours so you can take another big gulp, then you go for it, “I’ve always wanted to ask, what is your tattoo of?”

He glances down at his chest, moving the fabric aside so you can see the small marking again, and explains, “A jasmine flower.” You nod your head, not totally understanding the significance, then he clarifies, “For my mom, her name. She passed away from cancer when I was a kid. Got her the best treatment at the institute downtown, but it was too late.”

Your hand stills on the bottle. That is not what you had expected. You’d asked the question to be funny and teasing, to keep the conversation flowing after you’d blatantly checked him out.

But for Jaehyun to mention his birth mother to you like this, you clearly recognize the significance of it. You’d never actually looked into her, out of respect for his privacy, and the devastating details tell you you’ve made the right choice. No wonder he and his father are so close, why he’d always held such a disdain for Stephanie. He’s been through hell.

“Oh Jae,” you breathe out, tears pricking in your eyes at his somber expression. “I didn’t know.”

He shrugs, fingers tracing at the marble counter, “Not many people do, and I don’t talk about her, just like you don’t.”

He’d been so understanding of your peculiar relationship with your mother, and this is why. But while you’ve always held onto the hope that your mother’s absence from your life is temporary, he’d had to accept the permanence of his own situation.

You sniff, “It must’ve been lonely, just you and your dad.”

The minute shadow of a sad smile crosses his face, “Well it wasn’t just me and my dad.”

“No? Did he get remarried that soon?” ****

Jaehyun shakes his head. “It wasn’t just me and my dad, because it was me, my dad, and my _sister._ ”

“You… your what,” you spout it all up in surprise after he drops the random bomb, because you thought you’d finally known everything about him. Not yet.

He slides his phone over to you across the kitchen island, a picture open on the screen. It’s of an old family portrait that must’ve been taken fifteen years ago if his multiple missing teeth are any indication. There’s Mr. Jung, with a full head of hair, a stately statuesque woman wearing a pearl necklace, Jaehyun, and an older girl that has the exact same dimpled smile that he does. Who is wearing a pearl bracelet you've definitely seen before.

“My sister, I don’t know. I don't even know where to start with her. She was pretty and funny and incredibly smart, and she always wanted to do her own thing,” he recalls the girl from the picture, wistful and affected, eyes all the way closed. “She very much marched to the beat of her own drum, especially after she went off to Boston College. I never wanted to talk about her because you know, I was a young kid who hated girls at the time. I loved the prestige of being a congressman’s son, something she loathed, though she also hated spending time with Stephanie as much as I did. 

"She’d always get summer jobs, always had an excuse ready to avoid coming to the Hamptons or be seen on the campaign circuit. Out of respect, dad kept her out of the news as much as she could.You really wouldn’t have known she existed unless you went digging. That’s why you never met her.”

You do remember the Boston College flag displayed in his old apartment. You can even kind of recall the congressman talking to your father in passing, about how his older child was still in school, perhaps even her name? J something? On vacations as a kid, Johnny used to tell you that Jaehyun was so happy to play with him because he’d finally get to have a brother. That’d irked you because you hadn't understood at the time why Johnny’s attentions were divided.

“A few weeks before the election, she was out on BC’s campus when she was hit by a speeding car. She died on impact,” he divulges mournfully, the pain still hefty and palpable in his voice. “The driver and passengers were all high, and they had a fuckload of weed.”

Your heart is cleaving itself clear in two.

“This all happened while my dad, Stephanie, and I were in DC. He was still a congressman then, remember? You can probably imagine how horrible showing up to Mass Gen that night was,” Jaehyun is crying now, tears of mourning slipping past his lids as he aimlessly spins and spins the fruit bowl on your counter. “The kid was from this super rich family, I guess. We never ended up finding out who he was because the police were paid off to keep his identity a secret, and also to look the other way on the vehicular manslaughter charge. We kept her death out of the media as best we could, because we couldn’t handle seeing her everywhere. I think her funeral announcement was only printed in our town’s newspaper.”

The tears jab at your eyelids when you recall how truly shaken he was when the nurse had recognized him at MGH the night of John’s accident, how he must’ve been reliving his own awful night.

The words coming out of him are as stony as concrete and as icy as a glacial floe, but he can’t stop the avalanche of suffering, “My dad went to the feds for the weed, because law enforcement wouldn’t cooperate on the manslaughter. Although nothing much came out of it legally, the feds did manage to get BC to expel said students. Yet, they were kept anonymous, surely due to another large donation by whatever family that was.

"The wrong version of it ended up getting out though - weed was already legal in Massachusetts, but the papers didn't reveal just how much they had in their possession. All the reporters focused on was that ten students, ten promising future minds, were expelled because of something as simple as possession of marijuana. When that wasn’t what happened at all.

"It blew up in our faces, because it was so close to the election that pundits were looking for something that would turn the tide. The public took that and ran. Sterile, closed off, secretive, narc, they said it all about Dad, and then we lost. He was just trying to protect her. He was just trying to get justice.”

A shaky hand goes to cover your mouth as you think of all the times you’ve used that exact story to slander him and his father. How you’d been so quick to label Mr. Jung a narc, how your father had run ads tearing down Mr. Jung for his decision, how you’d been so convinced that Jaehyun would do the same to Johnny.

If you squeeze your eyes shut tight, like really tight, you can recall the ads that Mr. Jung had run in the week leading up to the election. Recall that they weren’t actually nasty, they’d been singling your father out for not taking action against trafficking-related crimes on campus. Mr. Jung had done all that, gone all the way to federal investigators, to get comeuppance for his daughter, for his daughter that was _killed._

“Dad’s company was named J4 for the four of us, Jeffrey, Jasmine, Jihyun, and Jaehyun. And now, it’s just me and my dad.”

Jihyun. You’d heard him say her name only once before, when he’d told your old student Zara about his father’s re-marriage, an incident that had become lost amongst all the others.

It all makes sense, why Jaehyun was so adamant about not smoking after Johnny’s incident, his intense worry at the hospital. Why he and his father are so close, why he’d always worked at his dad’s company, during summers and after graduation, even though software wasn’t his life’s passion. All they had was each other.

“I don’t even know what to say,” you’re too far away to reach for him, to grip his hand tightly, but you don’t even know if you have the capacity to touch him right now. “I’m so sorry.”

He exhales deeply as he wipes at his face, each gale of his breath braided through completely with abject grief, “It’s sad, and I think about them literally every minute of every day. But it happened a long time ago, so I just do my best to honor and remember them now.” His fingers brush over the tattoo on his chest, “I got this here, to keep mom close,” then they close around the pearl bracelet on his wrist, “And this was Jihyun’s, which is why I wear it all the time.”

He and you are joined by a thousand devastating threads, bound together by some inexplicable need the universe had to rain grief upon you both. There’s no surgical procedure, salve, or elixir that can be utilized to heal you.

“I get it, the unconditional love for your family,” you agree, solemn and heady with the crushing weight of the stories he’s told you, “that’s why I took over for John.”

“What?” He coughs on the wine he’s started to drink and you realize your mistake. You shouldn’t have tried to empathize in that way, to let your mouth blabber on in an effort to help shoulder some of the burden, to pivot this fast in an attempt to take the emotional pressure off him.

“Fuck,” you hide your face behind your hand at your slip up. “Yes, my brother and Wendy are having a baby. I let him step aside so he didn't have to get an arranged marriage, so he could live the life he wanted to.”

Jaehyun’s jaw comes unhinged, gaping at you from across your kitchen like he can’t believe what you’ve just revealed. You know. Sometimes you feel that way, too. You hadn’t expected this afternoon to become _Jaehyun and y/n reveal their deepest personal traumas afternoon_ , but you’re in it now. You’ve stated it so simply, like it’d happened after a wave of a magic wand, but you know Jaehyun picks up on the level of fuckery you’ve descended into.

“When you saw me at the Prudential Center, I was there to catch our dad by surprise so he couldn’t force Johnny into doing something he couldn’t do,” you disclose in between drinks of your wine to steady your nerves. “It’s turned into this whole shit show, but yeah, that’s what I did.”

“Can I ask you something then?” He presses on after he’s fully digested this revelation, a little tentative.

“Sure, I think I’m drunk so I will definitely answer,” you babble, with a loose tongue and looser inhibitions from chugging your wine that fast. “No fantasy talk, though.”

He blushes deeply, the same color as the bowl of cherries you have sitting out on the table, and then he ventures in a complete change of subject, “What’s going on with you and Mark?”

You miss the subtlety of his underlying question and you wave a hand, “We’re married.”

“Yeah, I know. I was there, remember?” he deadpans.

“That’s what’s going on,” you answer honestly because it is. The two of you are married and there’s nothing more to it to any other outsider, Jaehyun included.

But he’s not only an outsider, and he’s not dumb, which means he’s probably picked up on the real reason why you called and asked him to help you set up a Mark-Haechan rendezvous.

“I mean, I knew you weren’t actually engaged, that was easy enough to figure out,” he even says as much. Then, the words catch in his throat, a caesura of uncertainty, “But you told everyone that Mark was the love of your life, that you’d loved him through school and all of it.”

The underlying question detonates into you then, exactly what Jaehyun is trying to figure out. He wants to know whether or not you’d meant what you said about your feelings for Mark, in case they superseded certain other ones you had.

“Yeah, I did,” you affirm. “I love him a lot.”

“But, was that. Was that?” He’s struggling quite dearly to get it all out, _was that real?_

You start to reminisce, intoxicated and fond, and it is almost totally unrelated to the conversation you’re intensely engaged in, “You remember that cookie you got me for my birthday?”

Jaehyun’s brow furrows. “Yeah, what about it?”

“It sat in my kitchen for a month before I had to throw it out,” you divulge. “Didn’t want to eat it because it was too pretty.”

That night after returning home from your party, you’d sat in the middle of your fluffy white comforter and stared at that cookie until the sun came up the next morning. There were a thousand girly, probing, overdramatic questions swirling in your head, but you’d wanted to hold onto that confection for as long as you could, because it’d meant something to you.

“You want to know something else?”

“Sure.”

“I can tell you my wish now, since it won’t ever come true,” you confess, forlorn and a more than a lot sad over the _what could’ve been_ s.

“It won’t?” He probes curiously, trying to get you to make sense through your alcohol induced haze.

“Because of that freaking lavender cookie, I actually wished that I could get married to you. Which was very naive and childish in hindsight,” you laugh lightly, thinking of how rudely your mind had blabbed that when you’d faced the lit candle.“But yeah, now that can’t come true, which is very sad for me I have to say!”

“W-what?” Jaehyun stutters, bottom lip trembling in surprise.

Well, the wish hadn’t been exactly that, it’d been something like _please let me get married to someone as thoughtful as this_. It is only now that you’re realizing you’d actually been referencing him. But you can no longer get married to Jaehyun, because you’re married to Mark. Like you said, very sad for you, because you would’ve loved to be married to Jaehyun. Still would.

“I told you, I gave you a thousand second looks. My eyes were super, super greedy." You’re not completing the gravity of what you’re telling him, only rushing to get out the words faster. “Super greedy.”

You blink and Jaehyun is right next to you, somehow crossing across your kitchen in one diminutive heartbeat. He brushes the hair off your forehead, thumb arcing gracefully over the pink scar through your eyelid, and then he brings his mouth to your ear, confessing lowly, “I just want you to know, that if you weren’t married, I’d kiss you right now.”

“Oh,” you breathe out.

“But I will settle for this,” he moves his lips from your ear to the cresting slope of your cheek by your mouth and kisses you right there, a brush of the fondest, most tantalizing bit of him.

Jaehyun, Jaehyun. Whatever are you going to do with him? Keep him around for a little bit longer, you hope.

He holds your hand through an entire episode of _Real Housewives._ But you don't really pay attention to the drama, because all you can focus on is his pearl bracelet denting into your wrist. It does so with full ardor, with the full heft of the truth of his family, the truth you’re so honored to know now. He tucks a strand of hair behind your ear and kisses you on that pretty little spot by your mouth once more before he returns to retrieve Mark.

Mark comes home beaming from ear to ear, and you can’t stop smiling because of Jaehyun, and before you hold yourself back, Mark sweeps you up into a hug in your entryway.

“Thank you,” Mark whispers into your shoulder, and you know he doesn’t only mean _thank you for setting up the rendezvous with Haechan_.

He’s looking at himself through the lens of you, through whatever galaxy of thoughts that had run through your brain when you’d thrown yourself into harm’s way for him. He’s allowed to feel whatever he feels, but he knows you, he knows your unblemished heart.

“Anything for you, Marky,” you whisper in return.

That is all it takes, for the two of you to meld yourselves back into one. And though you're not in the clear yet - your slate is still dusted over with the chalk of your father's criminality - you feel like you're not as alone anymore. With Jaehyun, and Mark, maybe you can wipe it clean.

**tbc.**

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> FULFILLED MY PROMISE OF UPDATING ON TIME LOL. here we go folks, the roller coaster is beginning its final ascent. prepare yourselves! lol
> 
> as always stay safe and thanks for reading xo


	8. being

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A breadcrumb of terror dashes its way against you, Mr. Jung’s warm voice at your graduation party saying, "Welcome to our elite group of Harvard alumni."

You’re waiting at the crosswalk in front of the S&L building when the older woman next to you randomly exclaims, “Oh my gosh, you look just like them.”

You look around you, to see if there’s anyone standing nearby she could’ve been talking to. You’re the only one that’s there with her. “Excuse me?”

The woman holds a hand up to her eyes to block the sun and explains her comment, “Herb and Tiffy, are you their daughter?”

You have no idea who the hell Herb and Tiffy are, your mother’s name was decidedly not anything of the sort. Your dad’s name is Herbert, sure, but he’s never gone by Herb at any point of his life. Your mind sparks a memory, of the Tiffany that Mr. Lee had mentioned a few days ago, but surely there’s no correlation between that and this random woman.

You glue a polite smile on. “Sorry, who are you?”

“My name is Sunny, my friends and I went to Harvard a long time ago, and you look just like two of them,” she’s obviously convinced you’re this unknown couple’s child, but you really feel like she’s making things up. Maybe it’s your heightened sense of defense, but you want to get away in a flash, even though the woman seems harmless.

“Oh, no. I don’t think so,” you shake your head, stepping into the road even though the light hasn’t changed.

“Sorry, I guess I thought you were someone else. Have a nice day!” She calls as you continue to jaywalk, and you glance over your shoulder once you’re in the building to make sure she hasn’t followed you.

Lucas the false janitor is waiting for you in a deserted hallway off the lobby, and he catches that you’re a little bit more out of breath than you should be, “Are you okay?”

“Weird encounter on the street,” you mutter, watching Sunny continue on her stroll up the sidewalk. “Some woman thought she knew my parents, but I don’t think she did.”

“That is weird,” Lucas muses, before he puts his hands on your shoulders. “You ready, though?”

You nod resolutely. “Yes.”

“Talk me through the plan one more time?” He prompts as the two of you start to walk down the hallway. “Just so we’re both on the same page?”

The two of you had planned this mission late one night at the Newbury apartment, a session that you’d had to lie to Mark about after coming home. But you’re running out of time to get those ballots, it’s now or never.

“I’ve called an all hands on deck meeting, which requires everyone to be physically present. That means whoever’s down by archives will not be down by archives,” you begin, earning you a nod from Lucas.“We’ll have roughly seven minutes from the moment Jessica begins opening remarks until the time I’m supposed to speak, which is when people will come looking for me. We go in, grab the ballot box from the _Ti_ file cabinet, and get out.”

It’s completely foolish that you have to sneak around your own company like this, but you know you can’t waltz down into archives without someone getting suspicious. You’ve dropped by the basement at all hours of the day, and there’s always been more than one person patrolling the hallways. Considering Mr. Lee’s paranoia the other day, you’re surprised you haven’t been blocked from the basement floor completely.

It’s go in, get out. Simple enough.

“Ten is on lookout already, posted by the set of elevators that run down to the basement,” Lucas adds on, satisfied that you both are operating under the same set of instructions. “And he was able to snag a copy of the keys so we can get in.”

The alarm on your watch goes off, signaling the start of the ten o’clock meeting, and the two of you break into a run down the staircase. Lucas goes first, tentatively opening the basement door to check to see if it’s empty. Once he’s satisfied with the lack of human presence, the two of you continue your sprint down the hall.

You catch a flash of a janitor’s uniform by the elevator, and there Ten is, as promised.

“Hey, Wong. The keys,” Ten calls, slinging the metal ring over to your companion. “Good luck, y/n!”

After Lucas has clicked the key into place, you thrust yourselves into the dark void of nothingness that are the annals of the company’s history, where every deceitful little deed is recorded for permanent remembrance. The two of you don’t dare to turn on the light, but the image of this place will be forever burned into your eyelids.

You know exactly how many file cabinets down you need to go to get to the second column of T folders, that you need to go straight to the second drawer, that the sickening thunk of the drawer opening will be tattooed in your ears as well.

“There must be a shit ton of evidence in here. God damn,” you marvel as you eye the rows and rows of metal storage structures. You wouldn’t be surprised if half of these things were stuffed to the brim with the weed your dad was trafficking through the city. “You sure you want only the ballots?”

Lucas groans as he hefts the Tiffany box out of its hiding place, “It’s fine, once the indictment is through all these records will be subpoenaed.”

“We can only hope the idiots at this company are idiotic enough not to catch on and destroy it,” you wrinkle your nose in disgust at the thought of Henry getting his grubby hands on this. “Seems par for the course, though.”

“Gotta check the contents, give me a second,” he undoes the flaps at the top of the box and begins to sift through the cardstock ballot slips, checking for trackers or any anti-intruder devices.

He makes it an inch in, another, and then he freezes, “Wait, I feel something.” He scoops out an armful of the stolen vote slips, and then he laughs, “Would you look at that. They’re as sloppy as I thought.”

You’ve sifted through the first layer of ballots on this box yourself, but you’d been too distraught that time to dig through the contents in their entirety. What more could there possibly be? You crane your neck over Lucas’s crouched form, and then you see what he had.

“Oh fuck,” you half guffaw in disbelief, half spit in fury at your imagination come to fruition.

In the middle of the box, concealed by the disguise of stolen ballots, is a clear package stuffed to bursting. Stuffed to bursting with the olive green buds you’ve seen in Lucas’s evidence dossier hundreds of times by now. The label slapped across the front is what seals it together for you, reading _Boston University, summer course [shipment 13/54]._

Even throughout the three weeks of working intimately with the FBI’s big guns on this drug case against your father, there’d been the most infinitesimal bit of you that hoped this was all fake. That they’d been wrong, or had identified the wrong man, that there was no way at all your father had been involved in shipping methamphetamine laced marijuana to Boston universities.

But this is a double knockout blow against him, the drug trafficking and the election fraud, evidence twinning together in the jewelry box.

You take an involuntary step back, and Lucas glances up in concern, “Y/n? You okay?”

“Sorry, I just. I need a second,” you breathe out, eyes slamming shut and fingers pinching at the bridge of your nose. It’s suddenly stuffy in here, like every moth-eaten page is laced with the essence of the drugs, and you can barely keep the hyperventilation at bay, “I feel so dumb. Is it dumb that I thought even still that you were making things up? I can’t deny it now.”

Lucas locks up the cabinet, picks up the re-sealed box, and then nudges you with his arm in comfort, “It’s not dumb. Hoping to see the best in people is not dumb.” He takes his hand off the box to squeeze yours, to lead you out of this awful place, when the archive door is thrown wide, accompanied by a harsh cry.

“Get in here!”

“Fuck, get behind that cabinet!” Lucas hisses, slamming into your body so he can get you to move out of the stream of light. You wedge yourself behind the gap separating the 2000 and 2001 file cabinets as Lucas crouches with the box, out of sight.

“It’s only been three minutes, they shouldn’t have come looking yet,” you whisper, and Lucas shakes his head, putting his finger to his lips.

“Shh.”

“Yo, what’s this about? Aren’t we supposed to be at that meeting?” Matthew’s uncharacteristically deep voice rings out through the empty stacks as you peek your head out from your hiding place to look.

Out of nowhere, Henry pins Matthew up against one of the file cabinets, the younger man cowering in terror despite his height advantage. Henry growls, “Has someone been following you?”

“Me?” Matthew stutters, shaking his head back and forth. “No, I don’t think so?”

“All of your files have been accessed multiple times by a locked user over the past couple weeks. Are you sure no one is onto you?” Henry starts to interrogate him, and your fingers clutch at the cool metal of the cabinet you’re concealed behind. That locked user had been _you_ , using an encrypted key from the FBI.

“No one,” Matthew affirms.

“You haven’t made any of your deliveries recently, either.”

“There’s been more people than usual out by the truck! None seemed suspicious, but I wanted to be careful!”

“Remember, you’re helping us out to erase the late payments your father owes us. Would you like your father’s gambling problem to get out?” Henry threatens, curling his hand tighter to Matthew’s neck, arresting his air supply.

Fuck, that makes more sense now. According to Lucas’s data and the spreadsheets Junmyeon was able to dig up, the S&L board members were all responsible for funneling in a portion of their personal fortunes to help keep the drug operations running. But Prof. Kim had missed the past six months of payment, apparently due to this gambling habit.

Matthew’s clearly been doing drug runs to colleges on behalf of his father’s deficits to the company. No wonder he’d had the weed at your birthday party, and why there were always Tiffany boxes at the SME house. Jennie didn’t just like that specific luxury brand. You hope, somehow, that he hadn’t been giving them the hard stuff, but there's no way to know.

“I swear, it was no one!” Matthew cries as he starts to choke.

“What? Did you get cocky because I asked you to test the governor’s kids with our placebo shit? I could’ve picked any of you idiotic scumbags, I can take away my favor just as easily,” Henry’s hand is whitening with the amount of strength he’s using to constrict Matthew’s neck. “It was my father’s money that kept us going when yours couldn’t do his duty, and no asshole like you is going to keep me from having my wealth multiplied in gratitude.”

You’re afraid you’re going to witness another murder, but then there’s the faint sound of Lucas’s knee hitting the floor. You slap a hand over your mouth to conceal your breathing, as Henry lets Matthew go and whirls around, shouting, “Is someone there?!”

Lucas is already tucking himself into the space beside you, mutedly letting you know that he’d caused that diversion on purpose. You see the faint flash of his darkened phone screen before he whispers, “Stay silent. Trust me.”

Your heart rate spikes into nausea as you see Henry stalk down the row of alphabetical file cabinets, slamming at them, then peeking through all of the spaces with his phone flashlight on to cut through the darkness. You know that as soon as he makes it to Z, he’s going to make his way back up here, he’s going to look right at the 2000-2001 cabinets first, he’s going to find you and Lucas here, why didn’t you just run while you could, you’re still here, you’re unprotected, you’re sitting ducks—,

The front door bangs open with an earth shattering clang of metal, and then you hear Ten’s distinctive voice singing at the top of his lungs, _Baby I just feel so right, baby I just feel so nice, the most perfect sign, oh baby give it to meeeeeee._

You crane your neck to catch sight of him with his mop and cart, over ear headphones deafeningly blasting a song into his ears, and it looks like he’s come in to clean without a care. He’s practically unrecognizable with his hat and uniform on, they’d never pick him out as the bartender from Neo City. Wow. Lucas and Ten really are good.

“Sir. Sir!” Henry barks out, but Ten doesn’t look up from his mop, only moving it back and forth over the ground. “Sir!”

“Huh?” Ten only looks up and removes his headphones when Henry gets right in his face, snapping an arrogant finger in front of his nose. “Sorry, is there something wrong?”

“You should be at the all hands on deck meeting,” Henry sneers.

“The what?” Ten feigns ignorance, dumbly curious voice twisting out of his mouth. He’s playing his part to the t, most of the janitors here are outsourced, hence their lack of attendance at official meetings. Henry’s mouth twists into a disapproving frown, clearly of the opinion that your friend is below him, but not suspecting that he’s involved in any sort of fake out.

“Never mind, let’s go,” Henry grabs Matthew by the sleeve of his jacket and starts to drag him out of the door. He then pushes at Ten as well. “You need to leave too, CEO Suh won’t be pleased to hear that you’re down here.”

You almost laugh out loud at that fact, but you hold yourself back until the archive entrance is closed and you’re plunged back into total darkness. You and Lucas stay silent, don’t move, don’t even breathe, until the front door is tentatively re-opened, and a soft voice peals out, “Hey, you guys there?”

“Ten!” You gasp out in relief, folding your body completely in half as the anxiety, fear, and solace all fight to the death in you.

“Sorry about that, it took them a while to piss off,” Ten apologizes as he shuffles his cart back in, letting Lucas heft the ballot-drug box into the compartment below the cleaning supplies. “We’ll take this back to the office.”

You wipe the sweat off your forehead with your blouse, trying to get your rampant heartbeat back to normal as you leave that scary, scary place. Hopefully after this you won’t have to go back in, ever.The three of you make your way through a back exit, one that only you have access to, and they shed their disguises and stow the evidence into their car.

“Oh, one last thing. Any chance your dad might have stuff at his house?” Lucas inquires as Ten starts the car. “We have pretty much all we need, but you never know.”

You pause for a second, taking a moment to process his inquiry, but then you agree because you don’t really have a choice, “I doubt I can get into his apartment but our old Newton home might have something. He’s not there a lot so I’ll try to drop by. Thanks again.”

You haven’t been to your childhood house in some time, between being on campus and all of the places you’ve lived downtown while you were working. Normally, you would’ve gone there without a care, would’ve loved to see the cherry blossom on your street corner and wave at your elderly neighbors from your driveway. But this is different. This will be hard, loaded with memory and false nostalgia and hurt feelings that will bog you down if you have to sift through it all by yourself.

But perhaps you won’t have to do it on your own.

—

“Remind me why I let you come along on this?” You shout, as Jaehyun turns up the volume on Megan Thee Stallion for the tenth time this car ride.

He grins, dimple deepening into a cheeky crescent of joy, then cockily pops the collar on his gaudy orange Hawaiian tee. “Because you want to spend time with me?”

“Shut up,” you grumble as the automatic flush makes itself known on your cheeks. After you’d said all you drunkenly said to him in his kitchen, you thought he would move past it, treat it as just another one of your encounters. But clearly, he hasn’t.

“Because you liiiiike me?”

“I said shut up!” You hide your face behind your hand, embarrassed. “I wanted to leave the kiddos alone anyway.”

Having Haechan over to the house had been your perfect cover for coming out to the suburbs and trolling for evidence, and Jaehyun hadn’t even blinked twice when you suggested you go for a drive.

“I don’t know,” Jaehyun sighs as he looks out the window at your suburban Boston mansion, Patriots flag fluttering in the breeze. “This is your home, you know. It’s where you became you. I wanted to see it, at least once.”

How does he always know what to say? This boy.

Together, you hop out of the parked car and you take a deep inhale of the air, feeling like you’re eighteen and coming home after your first year in Cambridge. Jaehyun runs all the way up your front entryway, marveling at how a house like this can somehow have marble columns, and you slow to a stop as you follow behind him.

A tender scent wafts up to you from the ground, so, so comforting it’s like you could subsist on this and this alone. There it is, the little patch of lavender under your bedroom window, still as purple and glorious as you’d left it.

“Hold on a second before we go in,” you call to Jaehyun, then you drop back on your heels.

You reach out, fingers drifting out over the velvety, fragrant buds, and you can practically feel them, your mom’s hands in your hair as she braids a tuft of the flowers into your tresses. How the two of you would smell like lavender for the rest of the day, filling up the house with loveliness. How Johnny would complain about it but end up with bunches of the blooms in his hair anyways.

How you’d put a sprig into the breast pocket of your father’s dress shirts. How you want to pick one out just for him now, as if finding him and placing one there will bring the old him back to you.

“Come here,” Jaehyun murmurs as his fingers pluck out one tiny bud from the patch. He gently takes your hairclip, warm fingers dotting themselves into your scalp, and pins up a lock of your hair with the lavender bud.

The two of you are crouched in the dirt at your childhood home, and you’re sure he is the person who’s meant for you in every way.

“My sister would’ve loved this,” he sighs, laying back on the grass to gaze up at the sky. “Having all these flowers around her.”

You grasp his hand over his chest, what you wish you had done when he’d told you the story in his kitchen. His sentences are hushed and crackly as he sniffles, “I had no problem telling you about mom, but it’s just so much harder for me to talk about Jihyun. Dad loved her so much. He was so proud of her he’d switch out his Harvard sweaters for BC ones at all the football games.”

A breadcrumb of terror dashes its way against you, Mr. Jung’s warm voice at your graduation party saying, _Welcome to our elite group of Harvard alumni._

You don’t want to break the sorrowful moment, you want to give him ample time to agonize over his loss, but there is something you have to know.All these tendrils are leading back to your father, you’re sure he’s what’s binding all of you together. But there’s a needle of suspicion pricking at you after Jaehyun’s comment, that you’re all kneaded together in a deeper way.

“Y/n,” Jaehyun opens his eyes at the sound of you scrambling up from beside him, at the feel of your hand leaving his. “Wait, y/n! Where are you going?”

“I need to look for something,” you yell as you barrel into your house, running up the stairs to find the storage closet you know a lot of your dad’s old things are in.

You shift the cleaning supplies, Johnny’s old sweaters and a pair of slippers you wore in seventh grade to find this old clothes trunk, engraved with your father’s initials and the Harvard insignia. He used to pull out this trunk and show you his rowing uniform and class rings, and you know whatever you’re looking for has to be in here.

Tossing aside books, picture frames, and Harvard pennants, you find an old, yellowed envelope filled to the brim with newspaper clippings. You pick out the biggest one, an article snippet from the Harvard Crimson with an attached picture, and you begin to read out loud to Jaehyun, who’s on his knees beside you.

> **Drug scandal leads to expulsion for Harvard senior**
> 
> _Cambridge, Ma. September 10, 1991 -_ A shocking series of events to open fall semester has led to the expulsion of a fourth year student from campus. Tiffany Lee, 21, was escorted from the grounds apartments after campus police found illegal stores of marijuana in her possession, which she had been distributing to other students. According to reports, the presence of drugs in her living area was reported to campus police anonymously, allegedly by one of her fellow classmates. No word on whether or not she faces criminal charges.

It reads like a rather nondescript 90s story of university foolery until you see the picture that accompanies it. There’s five college students posing together, three men and two women with the couple in the middle holding hands. Your blood runs cold when you soak in their faces, then read the accompanying caption.

> Pictured (L to R): _Sunny Kim, Herb Suh, Tiffany Lee, Eugene Lee, Jeffrey Jung_

The woman furthest to the left, she’s the same woman from the crosswalk outside of your office. There’s your father, holding hands with a woman that looks irritatingly familiar, Mark’s father, and Jaehyun’s. Why didn’t you put it together, that Jeffrey Sr. went to Harvard at the same time as your dad? All this time, you thought the beef between your families stemmed only from the election.

“Is that Dad… and Stephanie?” Jaehyun asks in disbelief, eyes darting back and forth on the photo.

“No way, it says her name is Tiffany,” you think out loud, but as you squint at the picture, it’s definitely Stephanie.

She’s had an extensive amount of work done, but the facial shape is the same, her eyes are identical, and she’s wearing the same gold cross necklace. The same necklace that Ivan had been wearing, the same insignia that had been on Gerald’s ring. And she’s holding hands with your father?

“That’s definitely her,” Jaehyun wheezes, completely taken aback. “I had no idea our parents knew each other before the whole politics thing.”

You’re penetrated by two warring thoughts. One, that Sunny woman had asked you if you were Herb and Tiffy’s daughter, as in Herbert and Tiffany’s daughter, as in your father and Jaehyun’s stepmother’s daughter. Are you? You suddenly have no idea.

But the second, and the far more dangerous thought you have, is that all of the drug boxes had been stamped with the _Tiffany_ & Co. logo.

You throw away the first article and pick up the second to read.

> **Disgraced Harvard student will not face criminal charges, Boston businessman grateful for leniency**
> 
> Pictured (L to R): _Albert Lee, wife Stella Hwang, children Theodore Lee, Eugene Lee; Not pictured: Tiffany Lee_
> 
> _Boston, Ma. November 3, 1991 —_ Two months after prominent Boston businessman Albert Lee’s daughter Tiffany was expelled from Harvard College for possession of marijuana, the Boston Globe has learned Ms. Lee will not face criminal charges for her drug-related charges. The university’s investigation uncovered that Ms. Lee was running a lucrative distribution ring from her apartment in Cambridge, though it is still unknown where she’d procured the marijuana from, or if her claim that she was working alone was true. It also came out that fellow student Jeffrey Jung was the one who turned her into campus security. Ms. Lee has not been seen out in public with her family, all communication on her behalf has been done by the family lawyer.

Is Mark’s dad Stephanie’s brother? Beyond that, Jaehyun’s dad was the one who turned her in?

Jaehyun takes the clipping from your hand, slow moving in disbelief. But you don’t have time to explain to Jaehyun right now, you need to go on this gruesome scavenger hunt yourself. You tear through the remaining newspaper clippings, this awful trophy case your father’s amassed, and the puzzle pieces of this story cause your heart to bleed out as you put it together.

> _Harvard educated Jeffrey Jung, Sr. announces bid for Congress, second marriage to Stephanie Hwang after death of first wife_
> 
> _Herbert Suh to join forces with fellow Harvard graduate Eugene Lee, open S &L Corporation_
> 
> _CEO Herbert Suh announces past divorce from wife, kept under wraps for a year_
> 
> _CEO Herbert Suh and Congressman Jeffrey Jung, Sr. go head to head in the race for Massachusetts governor_
> 
> _Ten students at Boston College expelled after federal investigation for possession of marijuana, as mystery continues to surround on-campus car crash_
> 
> _Suh-prise! CEO wins first term as governor by a handful of votes._

It’s the very last clipping, a small cutout of a private funeral listing for a Jihyun Jung, complete with a beautiful graduation portrait of Jaehyun’s sister, that boomerangs right through your soul.

There’s only one way your father could’ve known about that. You’ve never been more ashamed to be his daughter, your father who’s disgraced your family name, who’s caused evil to befall so many others. You’re trying to propel your tongue into working, into revealing the worst thing it possibly can, _Jaehyun, I think. I think my dad killed your sister,_ when he tackles you down onto the carpeted floor, hand over your mouth.

“Wait, someone’s coming,” he hisses, shimmying you both out of view of your front door, into a spot where you can see exactly who is entering your house.

That turns out to be your father and Stephanie, mouths fused as they kiss in a fury. Jaehyun lets out this muted, disgusted noise and your jaw drops. With all of the newspaper clippings and her weird behavior over the past weeks, you want to say you’re not surprised, but you can’t help the shock. They’ve been having an affair this whole time? Even if they’d dated at Harvard, he’d been with your mother for so many years after, right?

“Mmm, baby, don’t think about that now,” Stephanie whines after your dad pulls his face away from hers.

“She isn’t picking up her phone,” he keeps one hand on her waist and scrolls through his Blackberry with the other. “She’s really losing it, she called an on hands on deck and didn’t show up. Flew in from DC to check on her, and she’s not at the office today either.”

“That bitch is going to be nothing but trouble for us,” Stephanie curses, in direct reference to you.

“It’s fine, once she gets pregnant we’ll force her to step aside. Jung’s kid’s been sniffing around her, like his dad I suppose.”

“He’s infatuated with y/n, it’s been obvious for years now,” Stephanie scoffs, rolling her eyes. “Maybe they’ll have an affair, we can get the media to take her down that way.”

Jaehyun’s hand closes around yours when your father actually laughs in agreement, “That could work. Henry and the kids, even Eugene, are getting nervous for no reason. Can’t handle her snake tongue, I guess.

“Y/n gets that from her mother. I should’ve never used that woman tried to replace the void you left. I would’ve dumped her if she hadn’t gotten pregnant.”

That is a searing brand of a cruelty you’ve never heard from him before. Likening your mother to a drop of world’s deadliest venom is already awful, but the revelation that she had only been some kind of pathetic placeholder to him is simply devastating.

“It doesn’t matter as long as you’re here with me now, baby.”

“I just can’t believe we’ve gotten this far.”

“I know. When we decided to go for the governorship to decimate feckless little Jung’s life, I’d never thought I’d become a candidate for president,” your father marvels, wrapping his arms around Stephanie and smiling down at her for a second before he scowls, face transforming completely.“I really hate that man. He was picked to captain the crew team, ended up valedictorian over me, stole the internship at Senator Lau’s. I can’t believe he ever thought I was his friend, or ever dared to like you.”

You hazard a glance at Jaehyun, but he’s entranced by the revenge plot that is spewing out of Stephanie’s mouth,“I’ve been yours this whole time, baby. It was lucky for us that his crush on me never really went away. Changed my name but couldn’t change that, huh? Lucky too, that Jasmine died just as I got back to the city.”

Jaehyun’s face hardens into rage in an instant, and you have to throw yourself in his way so he doesn’t give you away in a bellowing explosion. Fuck, that is the worst part of it yet, that she waited until Jaehyun and his family were deep into grieving to weasel her way back into their lives.

“He would’ve won that fucking election if your brother hadn’t come through for you,” your dad ties the familial connection together, confirming that Mark’s dad is indeed Stephanie’s brother, that this had all been a _family business._ “We seriously underestimated how much Jihyun dying actually helped him, no matter how many ads we ran. He was ahead in the polls up until Election Day, I remember waking up at three that morning to ensure Eugene hit all of the necessary spots to sway things in our favor.”

“That’s Eugene,” Stephanie says with a dark laugh. “Loyal to a fault because I was the one who took the fall at school for the both of us. Too bad his kid didn’t turn out the same way.”

So that’s what Mr. Lee’d meant, that he’d been doing this all to protect Tiffany. He must’ve been the source of the weed even back then. When Stephanie was the only one caught and punished, he’d felt obliged to make amends.

“I’ve never seen a kid pussier than Mark. Thought he was gonna piss his pants when Eugene went rogue and turned that gun on him,” your father takes his opportunity to shit on your best friend, and you are itching, _itching_ for a fight now. “Having Henry as a son-in-law would’ve been so much better, he would've kept funneling his family money to us under his father’s nose forever." He shakes his head with a disgusted sneer and continues on, "You already know I singled out Henry not only for his shrewd ambition, but to leverage his distaste for his father, to get back at the senator for picking Jung for the internship. But it’s probably better for us that the elder Lau not keel over from a heart attack when he realizes his family fortune has secretly been funding our work."

“On top of that, once my idiot husband caves and endorses you, all the pieces will be in place to bury him forever,” Stephanie trills, more rancor than excitement present in her voice. “If it’s true, and the FBI really is sniffing around, all we need to do is get a shipment placed in his house. I can picture it now: Jung’ll blame you for planting it with seemingly no proof. Because you are who you are, the public will assume that he’s lying and switched sides to get close enough to you to exact his revenge. We'll make it out that he's been the real one behind it all, he’ll have his reputation wrecked permanently, and then he'll go to jail.”

Could that happen? Could they really plant it all on the senior Jung and get away without consequence? Lucas has mountains of evidence, that's not possible, right? Please say it's not possible.

“You know the fact that I love you is the only reason I continue going along with your crazy schemes?” Your father slyly, seductively growls at her. “Well that, and the ridiculous amounts of money it affords me.” Before you know it they’re kissing again.

They make out for a solid length of time, one that you have to turn your head for in disgust, and then they stop so your father can say, “Jung’ll never know what hit him when the FBI comes knocking. His soft heart caving to re-associate with us is all we need to have him destroyed for good.”

Thank god Jaehyun had taken your advice at that dinner. If Mr. Jung had offered one iota of public support towards your father, they would’ve tried to take him down.

“I sincerely hope that his life has turned out so nicely for him after he ruined mine. My life was ravaged after he snitched, I had to run with my tail between my legs while he got all the glory. He’s a fucking little narc,” she absolutely spits in loathing. “Started with me, continued it with his daughter. ”

Oh, no.

“Even though it was a total coincidence, your nephew did beautiful work on that one,” your father cracks sarcastically. “Thought Theodore was going to off himself when his child followed in his hated sister’s footsteps and dealt our shit at BC.”

Stephanie groans, “Don’t remind me about that shit show. I heard from Eugene that Theo hasn't spoken to Gerald since Daddy bailed him out. Apparently, Righteous Theodore thought it was inexcusable that I was banished from the family while Gerald was coddled, which I can't say I disagree with, family loyalty should take precedence. Yet, he still thinks that his own son should’ve gone to prison for accidentally killing that girl.”

Jaehyun leaps out of his prone position in an instant, objective of laying low thrown out the window, flying down the stairs completely consumed in his fury. “What?!”

“Jaehyun!” You yell after him as quietly as you can, however the two adults are focused on the intruder and not you. You won’t stop him, he deserves the honor of defending his loved ones. Especially with the news that Mark’s cousin Gerald had been the speeding, high driver that’d killed his sister.

“Where did you come from, son?” You can hear the shakiness in your father’s voice, but he keeps otherwise calm as he addresses a fuming Jaehyun.

“So, it was you, this whole time? My sister dying was all because of you?!” Jaehyun’s screaming at the pair of adults, face purpling with effort, his neck cording. “You did all of this, what, for money? Because my dad got you kicked out of Harvard?!”

You think Stephanie’s going to keep her cool like your dad, but she absolutely loses it, sticking her finger in Jaehyun’s face and shrieking, “I did this because getting expelled from Harvard destroyed my life! My parents kicked me out, my siblings were strong armed into abandoning me, I was shunned from my place in Boston high society, and by the time I knew it, I was homeless and doing things you can’t even imagine to survive.”

The level of her spewed vitriol sloshes up the staircase into your ear, crashes into Jaehyun in a fucked up tsunami, and then her voice goes chillingly calm, “But selling drugs was fast money, I’d already done it with Eugene at school as a hobby. He had a freshman roommate who had ties to the cartels in Honduras, and from there it was easy.

“So, I won’t have you dismantling decades of hard work to take down your father, you fucking cocky prick. You think I liked doing this? Lying in wait, barely keeping afloat by supplying my little Eastern Massachusetts town with the weed Eugene would ship to me from time to time? Waiting until my path crossed with Herbert again and discovering that he’d moved on? Changing my name, changing my _face,_ so nobody in the Boston elite would know that I’d returned, not even my parents? You think I liked any of that? These were all willing sacrifices I made, to achieve my deserved comeuppance. No one would suspect pious, air-headed Stephanie Jung could be capable of this, which made it perfect.”

You think she’s done with her horrible monologue, but she takes a domineering step towards Jaehyun and there is pure evil in her voice, “Don’t get it twisted. The money and power has been a deliciously sweet bonus. Fooling your father into a marriage and watching him lose the election was even sweeter. But watching your mother and sister go first, ohhh, that was the sweetest of it all.”

You thought this all boiled down to your father, but Stephanie has taken his place in the epicenter of it all. She’d been the one originally caught with drugs, she had the source in Eugene, and your ensnared father had been brought along to turn it into an empire. An empire built to destroy Jaehyun’s father.

“Don’t you dare say anything against my mother. Or my sister. They were innocent,” Jaehyun snarls at her, keeping his fists clenched at his side so he won’t feel obliged to swing. He faces your dad next, “And you, you just went along with it? Gave her your money, for what?”

“If the love your life’s life was destroyed, son, don’t you think you would do the same?” Your father questions Jaehyun, who is standing tall and defiant, and does not even pause to think about how his phrasing might affect you. The love of his life. Your father had called Stephanie the love of his life. It is almost relieving, to hear those words, and know that your mother would never have to bear the weight of that cross.

Your father grits out a hard, “But you have to know. You’re trespassing right now,” and pulls a gun out of his jacket pocket, aiming it right at Jaehyun’s face.

You’re dashing down the stairs before you register your legs moving.

“No, stop!” You shout, throwing yourself in between him and Jaehyun, a gesture you can’t believe you’re actually having to repeat. You stare down the barrel of the gun without a lick of fear. Your father won’t shoot you. He won’t.

“Y/n?” His hand trembles around the weapon. “What are you doing here?”

“I should’ve gone with Mama. I should have. That’s what she wanted me to do, right? To go with her?” The tears are streaming down your face as you fumble for Jaehyun’s arm behind you, his hand meshing with yours in a second. She’d been begging you to leave with her, and you’d made the wrong choice. “You know, I never understood why she left without us, but I think I do now. She knew all about it, didn’t she? But you would never, ever let her leave with your heirs. Did you force her to leave us behind? So you could build us up to take our place in your kingdom?”

He’s sociopathic, psychopathic, any and all kinds of terrible words that describe what sort of monster he is. Because after you’ve finished questioning him, his head dips in the smallest nod.

“Herbert! Shoot them and be done with it! Eugene will clean up!” Stephanie shrilly orders him, but he pushes her to the floor as she tries to approach him.

He dips his voice lowly, into the voice that he’d used to read you stories at bedtime, the fatherly voice you haven’t heard from him in so long. “Y/n, there’s still time for you.”

“Jaehyun, we have to go,” you whisper, but you’re not sure if he can hear.

“You can be a part of our family again,” he’s using your memory against you, trying to mesmerize you into falling in line. “You can come all the way to the White House with us. You can do so much good as First Daughter, can help us out so much.”

Stephanie is screaming into her phone, _Get to the house, they’ve found us out!_ Even if your father won’t shoot you, whoever she’s calling definitely will, you need to escape this house.

“Jaehyun,” you whisper again. “We need to go.”

“Just take my hand,” your father extends his unoccupied fingers, still training the gun on you, and the poisonous honey falls right from his lips to your ears, “Y/n, my little princess. We’ll make the Suh family great.”

You would rather be nameless.

“Jaehyun,” you finally find your voice, shouting loud enough that he can finally hear. “Go! Now!”

As if he’s prodded alive with electricity, Jaehyun throws the door open and pulls you out by the hand as a bullet ricochets off the frame of the door. Your father shot at you. Your father _shot at you._ The ringing blast of the slug of metal into the wood sears itself into your ears as you and Jaehyun run to his car, your head wildly swinging back and forth to see if anyone’s out on the street. As soon as the doors of the vehicle are closed around you, you hear the screech of another set of tires coming up the tires. You look in the rearview mirror and there’s a hulking Range Rover closing in on Jaehyun’s tiny BMW, spiking your fear into the roof.

“Go, Jae, go, go!”

Jaehyun lead foots it, the car zipping right down the road, leaving behind a trail of smoke, and he starts to expertly navigate your old neighborhood as the Range Rover continues to ominously approach. He weaves in and out between cars parked on the road, blowing through stop signs and disregarding passengerless crosswalks, and you clutch at his hand over the dash until he pulls out onto a main road with more room.

You try to call Johnny, and sob in frustration when it goes right to his voicemail. Wendy’s does too, and your nerves teem with dread.

“Call Mark. Call Mark right now,” you frantically request, and Jaehyun does so as you dial a different number on your own phone.

“Hello, Lucas, Lucas we need you!” You shout into the receiver as soon as the agent has picked up.

“What’s going on?”

“Hello?” Mark’s tentative voice echoes into the car from Jaehyun’s speakerphone. “Jae?”

“Hold on, Lucas!” You cry into one phone before turning to the other. “Mark, it’s me, it’s me.”

“Baby gorl?” He asks, seemingly unbothered by your surprise call. Your chest collapses in relief at the knowledge that he is safe. “What’s up?”

Jaehyun takes a particularly hard left at a random intersection and your head goes careening against the window. “Listen, you need to get Channie out of there.”

“What?”

“Just do it, tell him to go home,” you order forcefully. “Now!”

“Okay,” he obliges, though his voice is full of doubt, even when he passes off your request to Haechan. “What’s going on?”

“I’m sorry, Mark,” your voice breaks fully, a fresh bout of tears weeping out of you. “I love you so much, you know that right?”

He is your very, very, very best friend. If you never see him again, he has to know. Has to know that you would do this all again just for his safety, has to know that you’re sorry for everything your family has done to him.

“I do. I love you too,” Mark reciprocates, words soft and emotional.

“I’ll call you when I can,” you warble, and then you end the call so you can get back on the other. “Lucas, my dad knows. He knows I know. We were being chased by some associates of theirs, I think we lost them. I need to get out of here.”

You don’t see that Range Rover behind you anymore, but that doesn’t mean you’re in the clear, not by a long shot.

Lucas doesn’t have to pry any further because he knew this could be a possibility. He simply informs you, “I’ll dispatch agents to your companions’ locations. I’m at the entrance to the botanic gardens by Lake Waban. I’ll be waiting.”

“Where am I going?” Jaehyun asks as he continues to expertly drive with one hand.

“Outskirts of Wellesley, I’ll put it into the map,” you instruct him, queuing up the device and feeling the weight of his peripheral stare on you.“I know you have a million things to ask. I’m so sorry.”

Sorry for the way your dad orchestrated the most painful moments of his life is where you should begin, you suppose. But there are other things to be sorry for, like calling his father that most loathsome word. Narc. Should’ve been _hero._

He purses his lips but doesn’t sound altogether mad when he says, “You have nothing to be sorry for.”

You’re not convinced he’s not eating himself up inside, but he’s already doing you a favor by driving all the way out here. You busy yourself with writing down every gruesome detail of your father and Stephanie’s conversation on a napkin you find in the glovebox, and by the time you look back up, Jaehyun is turning into the deserted dirt road at the front of the gardens. There are three cars parked there, and Lucas’s lanky figure is easily spotted leaning on the hood of one of them.

You jump out of the car before Jaehyun’s even fully put it in park, and it all comes spewing out of your mouth as soon as you’re within Lucas’s earshot,

“Papa and Stephanie Jung walked in on me while I was looking for evidence at home. She was the third mastermind behind it all. Her, papa, and Eugene. I’m sorry I didn’t have the presence of mind to steal anything, but I wrote it all down.”

“Y/n, it’s okay,” he tries to soothe you as you give him the napkin, but it’s clawing at you, the deceit and the lies and all of the awesomely horrible things they did.

“It was them, they really did it all. I didn’t want to believe it, that my own dad, that he could do something like this for her—,” you’re hyperventilating, your air struggling to come up in anything but gasps.

“Y/n, you have to keep calm—,” Lucas holds his arms out to try and settle you back down, but you can’t, you can’t do this, you can’t.

“The drugs and Jaehyun’s poor sister and rigging the election they did it all and didn’t give a fuck how could they even do something like that I don’t understand,” you are hysterical now, positively gasping for breath, consumed wholly by the atrocities you'd just witnessed. You're so unhinged you scream particularly loudly at a skid of tires, “What was that?!”

“I don’t know but we should get you going,” Lucas gently puts a hand on your shoulder, to guide you away from the open road. “I cannot come with, as I am the lead on this case, but my associates Sehun Oh and Kai Kim will be trailing you. Your safe house is in the suburbs of Atlanta. Everything’s set up for you. We’ll continue to watch Mr. Suh, Ms. Shon, both Mr. Lees, and accompany Mr. Jung home.”

You glance into the dim light of the other car and see the two men waiting inside, a sign that you won’t be alone on your impending arduous journey. The promise to keep a watchful eye over the ones you hold dear is enough to calm your heart back into functioning territory.

“Thank you. Thank you so much,” you murmur into Lucas’s ear as he sweeps you up into a reassuring hug before he gets into his car.

But when you turn back around, Jaehyun isn’t doing the same. He’s standing there behind you as he always is, listening closely and but staying silent, hands clasped in front of him as he waits for you.

You approach him in disbelief, “What are you doing? Leave with Lucas, he’s FBI! They can’t find you here.”

His eyebrow raises - you’d done a good job of keeping your mouth shut about Lucas’s identity apparently - but he does not budge another muscle. “I’m going with you.”

“Jaehyun, you can’t—,” you start to argue against his own argument.

He shuts you down. “You can’t tell me I can’t. You have to let me go with you.”

“But your dad!” you protest, finally understanding the gravity of him doing such a thing, “You can’t just leave him like this!”

“I can. He knows me,” Jaehyun reassures you, and that statement alone is a lot to process.

He used to be a kid you were so suspicious of, someone you’d sidestepped and avoided and called names. Then he was a kid you didn’t feel was worth your time, someone who you only spoke in platitudes to, that only knew the surface of you. Finally, he was a kid you were infatuated with, who’d been good for clandestine encounters and mutual longing and a future that wasn’t quite ever going to happen.

But now? Now, he is the person you trust most in this world.

Your decision is made for you in that instant, and you run up to Lucas’s car and tap on the window. He rolls it down and eyes you in confusion,“Ma’am?”

“Lucas! Please check in on Jeffrey Jung, Sr. Jeffrey Jung, Jr. will need to come to Atlanta. He was there at the house as well.”

Lucas looks past you, to where Jaehyun is already getting into the Honda they’ve provided, and he nods knowingly.

“Will do, ma’am. Safe travels.”

**tbc.**

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> boom bam, talk about a reveal if i do say so myself!!!! ;) 
> 
> thanks, as always, for reading


	9. healing

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> There’s something about his demeanor that’s nagging at your lingering nausea, how he feels so tightly coiled that he could spring apart at any moment.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> a very, very, very fun preface before you read this chapter:
> 
> this entire fic was inspired by a certain W photoshoot (see: latest jcc), you know exactly what photoshoot i'm talking about. i saw the pics and came up with the plot in my head immediately after. the first scene of this chapter is a look/aesthetic taken right from the pictorial, so open the pics up in another tab as you read for the visual experience lol

Jaehyun stays locked in at the steering wheel for nine hours straight, car plunged into silence. You both have your phones turned off, it doesn’t seem appropriate to blast the radio, so the time is mostly punctuated by the sound of the GPS pinging and the crunch of you handing him peanuts to eat as he drives.

The vehicle rolls to a stop by a little inn outside of Williamsburg in Virginia just as the clock ticks past three am. He finally breaks the silence with a low, pained exhale, “We should stop here. I’m wiped.”

The car that’s been trailing you pulls up on the gravel beside you and both sets of windows roll down. You holler across the road to Agent Oh, “Is it okay to stop? Should I keep driving?”

You have half a mind to make it to Atlanta in one go, because Virginia is close to DC and DC makes you think of your father and what if he has associates around? 

But Sehun gives you a reassuring smile from his own car, “No, Mr. Jung is right, it would be fine to stop here.”

There are only two rooms open and the bored attendant couldn’t give more of a fuck when you splutter in embarrassment and ask her to double check. You’d wanted one for Kai and Sehun, one for Jaehyun, and one for yourself. Because even though he’d consented to coming on this crazy trip with you, perhaps recognizing he’d be in danger if he stayed in Boston, that doesn’t mean Jaehyun has to be okay with spending the night in the same room with you.

You pay with cash the FBI has provided, feeling yet another drop of guilt at having to rely on others, but this situation is so dire that you force yourself to be okay with it. As soon as she hands over the keys, Kai and Sehun scuttle off to their room, exhaustion evident under their eyes. 

You make your way back out to the parking lot, groaning internally as you eye the tiny backseat of the Honda, your likely bed for the next few hours. It’s going to be sweaty and cramped, but you know the alternative is way more precarious. 

“Are you coming?” Jaehyun asks quietly, turning the piece of plastic back and forth in his hands.

You shrug, “Someone needs to stay with the cars.”

“Don’t be an idiot, just get in the room,” he mutters, as he steps out of the way for you to climb back onto the sidewalk.

There’s something about his demeanor that’s nagging at your lingering nausea, how he feels so tightly coiled that he could spring apart at any moment. The inside of the hotel room doesn’t do anything to alleviate that, in fact, it just makes your desperation worse. The room is dimly lit by yellowish light from the one broken bulb in the ceiling, and the inside walls are lined with cracking wood panels. But it’s not only the shoddy outward appearance, it’s also the fact that there’s one tiny mattress in the middle of it all.

“I, can we talk?” You ask as soon as you truly register the space you’re going to have to share with him. The inside of the car had been a tight fit already, but with fewer implications than a shared bed.

He slumps heavily into the rickety chair, running a hand through his hair as he dismisses your request, “We don’t need to.”

He leans his head all the way back, the expanse of his pale throat baring itself to you. All you can picture is him alone in your house, that exact spot bubbling with his blood after you weren’t there to save him from your father’s gun. 

“The only thing I knew about was the election rigging,” you start to babble, unable to keep the dam of hurt from unleashing your confessions. “I found the stolen ballots in the basement of S&L — I assume Eugene put them there at my father’s request — that night we ran into each other at Neo City.”

Jaehyun’s got his eyes screwed shut, like he doesn’t want to be hearing this. But you power forward because this might poison you from the inside if you don’t suck it out from your own soul fully, “Ten, the bartender you met there, was a CI for the FBI, and they got me to be one as well. But they weren’t only investigating the election fraud. They were investigating drug trafficking.”

“You don’t need to keep going,” he grunts, but you don’t hear him.

“They’ve been trafficking meth laced weed to Boston universities for god knows how long. I spent the last month gathering up everything I could so Lucas and his team could put together a federal indictment for my father. I’d assume for Stephanie and Eugene too, and it’ll probably have to include manslaughter now, for your sister—,”

“I said you don’t need to keep going!” he snaps, standing up from the chair with clenched fists.

Your hand shakily covers your mouth when you register what you’ve inadvertently mentioned, and your hushed whisper trembles, “Jaehyun, I, I didn’t mean to bring that up, oh my god, I’m so sorry.”

He lets out a low exhale, unfurling his fists slowly and flexing his fingers, then he brusquely hurries into the bathroom, slamming the door behind him. You hear the faucet turn on and why, why, why, why, why did you have to bring his most personal pain into this? You could’ve given him the objective facts of your involvement, sincerely apologized, and then left the room to go sleep in the car.

Jaehyun re-emerges not a minute later, his bangs and face dripping, like he’s just rinsed off in the sink, and you feel so guilty for being even remotely affected by the way the water spills down his neck in rivulets.

“Jae, I’m so sorry.”

“I know.”

“But if I can just explain,” you try to start again for the hundredth time, but he’s more prepared now.

He sticks out a hand, stopping you, “You don’t need to explain, say you’re sorry, do any of that. I already said so.”

He’s allowed to react in any way he wants, you know that, but you can’t help the frustration at his passivity, “Why not? I feel the need to say sorry!”

“Why do you need to be sorry?” He asks, as if you aren’t who you are. He’s taking this way too easily, it’d almost be better for him to resort to screaming, for the way he truly feels about you to be drilled straight into your head.

“Because I do!”

“Why?”

You sigh deeply, “Because I don’t want you to feel hurt like that ever again.”

“But why?!” He bursts out, chest heaving with this incredible force of tensile strength, eyes searching the space like the answer is pasted up on the dingy walls. Then, he levels you with an unspeakable look and an inscrutable question, “Are we something or nothing, you and me? If we’re nothing, then I will leave you alone. But if we’re something, you need to tell me.”

The tiny room becomes claustrophobic in a second, you’re sure that even the people in Boston are being affected by the rate of magnetic flux pulsating between you two. You can’t look at him when you quietly admit, “It’s because you mean more to me than anyone, okay? You mean more to me than anyone.”

You’re taking in the gritty fluorescent light of the bedside clock, red numbers flashing 3:37, when Jaehyun explodes into your vision, his pretty eyes and nervous mouth and wet hair and by the time the clock ticks forward to 3:38, he’s kissing you. He holds your face so tightly, his thumb tracing a perpendicular path past the pink blemish across your closed eyelid, his lips ghosting over yours in a half dozen presses of the wispiest flecks of affection. 

You don’t know why a previous promise of his darts into your brain into that moment, and you push at his shoulders lightly, whispering, “I’m married,” once his mouth is off of yours.

“That comforter is green,” he retorts back, and your brow wrinkles in confusion under his grasp. He’d told you himself he didn’t want to cross that line.

“What?”

He brings his face infinitely closer to yours, and he smiles, like it’s the very first time you’ve ever charmed him, and whispers, “Oh, I’m sorry. I thought we were talking about things that don’t matter.”

That joke is so him, the real twenty two year old him, here in the room with twenty one year old you. In the eye of the storm, you’re just two kids enamored with each other, you so much so that you really can’t not kiss him right now. 

Your mouth is set upon his in a second, his fingers instantly dropping to clutch at your waist, and you need this stupid Hawaiian tee off, even though he’s already doing you a favor by wearing it so garishly unbuttoned all the time. It’s so overwhelming, all of him, his tattoo and his bracelet and his tender heart that your breath hitches as he pushes that blasted green comforter aside and cradles you right into his lap.

His soft black hair is threaded into your fingers as you press yourself into him, not wanting your lips to be parted from his for even a heartbeat, not wanting to pull back again from him if you don’t have to. You’ve been denied this for too long, by the circumstances, and stupidly, by yourself, but none of that matters anymore. Your mouth is everywhere on him like it hasn’t been before, the tangent of his collarbone and the strength of his Adam’s apple and even to the deepest depth of one of his dimples, just because you feel like it.

You’ve done this before, done this with him, but that doesn’t stop the nerves that creep up into your neck when his hand splays across the breadth of your bare thigh. It’s laughable, that you’re perched up against him like this, your legs and body on his with complete boldness, and you’re still getting nervous about it. But he catches your subtle tremble.

“Hey, sweetheart, you okay?” He breathes out, searching your eyes with his.

You must be the luckiest girl in the world, to have someone like Jaehyun, someone this meaningful.

In a direct echo to the first night you spent together, you nod softly, then take off your grey tee because what clearer way is there to tell him that you'd like for this to happen? The tiny bed can barely handle both of you, his hand around your bare waist the only thing steadying you out on top of him, and there’s an immensely hilarious struggle to get his shorts off because you simply won’t stop kissing each other.

But it’s him and it’s you and even though none of this has gone by the book, you will never get over the way he holds your gaze in awe, how you can feel his heartbeat thrumming in symphony with yours. How he gently holds you the whole time and somehow can’t stop smiling, especially after he lays you down on the pillow. How he can’t resist kissing you again afterwards, even though you’re a sweaty, sweaty mess.

He tucks you into him fully, all of him protecting all of you, and then he murmurs against your cheek, “You’re a fixer. You fix things. I get it, but you don’t have to fix this.”

“I’m sorry.” You can’t help it. 

He sighs and gently lifts a piece of your hair to fiddle with, “I know you are, but if we both judged each other by the vices of our fathers, we would’ve hated each other forever.”

You think of that angry girl in the Hamptons, how petty and steadfast and loyal she was, and you don’t even know how you were ever that girl. “But like, my dad’s an actual criminal. Yours was just trying to do the right thing.”

“This is something for me to work on in my own time. The only thing you can do is give me space when I need it,” he admits, and though there is palpable anxiety in his eyes, he still grabs your hand to knot his fingers through yours. “I’m always going to be biased about you, no matter what. I can’t ever see myself seeing you in that light. If that’s naive, so be it.”

If he’s going to be admittedly naive, you’re going to be stubbornly apologetic, you’ll probably spend the rest of your life trying to make it up to him, but you have a more pressing fear that you voice, “I don’t want you to wake up and suddenly hate me.”

“I won’t,” he swears immediately, embrace around you tightening as if he’s envisioning it. “But I promise if I do, we’ll talk about it first.” 

You know that it’s not going to be all sunshines and lollipops in Atlanta, that there will be very real moments where he realizes the gravity of your family’s actions. That he may even want to leave, which is totally fine with you, as long as he goes somewhere safe. But you’re willing to spend forever talking about it if it means he’ll be there with you.

You’d had this thought back in Boston, but you have to tell him, “I trust you. More than anyone.” 

Jaehyun kisses you like that was the best thing you could’ve said.

—

It’s night and day, the trip from Boston to Virginia and the trip from Virginia to Atlanta. You and Jaehyun sing at the top of your lungs to Beyoncé, you pick out all of the M&Ms in the trail mix for him, and he holds your hand the entire drive there.

The house the FBI’s prepared for you is this tiny sand-colored cottage, the exact same hue of the brownstone you’d lived in with Mark. Sehun and Kai have the matching one next door. This neighborhood is nothing like the stuffy one you grew up in, there are dozens of kids running around the sunny sidewalks, and the couple across the street from you are grilling out on their lawn.

Everything’s ready for you, furniture and groceries and clothes, and Jaehyun nearly leaps out of sneakers in giddiness when he sees that there’s boxes of Captain Crunch waiting for him. He pours himself a giant bowl of the cereal, content to eat only that for dinner, and promptly proceeds to fall fast asleep on the couch, completely tuckered out from driving the whole second leg.

You gently shift his head so it’s resting on a pillow on your leg and you put your feet up on the ottoman, turning on the TV in search of some Real Housewives. What you get, instead, is a rather severe-faced Lester Holt of NBC News, flashing on your screen with the Breaking News chyron in crimson red. 

“Bedlam continues in Massachusetts as the FBI raided the offices of the S&L Corporation this evening, following the governor’s indictment in the morning. We go down to Baekhyun Byun and Minseok Kim, who are on the scene in Boston.”

You want to fall to your knees and scream, but Jaehyun is in your lap and you won’t wake him up to this. You just watch in sick fascination as the reporter hovers in front of the same building entrance you walked into for the past two months. 

“Thank you. As it’s been reported, at seven this morning, federal prosecutors issued an indictment for Massachusetts Governor Herbert Suh, former CEO of Boston’s S&L Corporation.”

You’re treated to a very high-definition video of your father being escorted from his townhouse in handcuffs. Multiple FBI agents, with Lucas at the forefront, surround him as he is pushed into a car with tinted windows.

Minseok Kim nods severely, continuing the report, “Suh has reportedly been at the center of a federal investigation since the start of his first term as governor. It was revealed that S&L was operating as a dummy corporation, standing in place to cover a massive drug trafficking effort that extended throughout the Boston area, pilfering into numerous Boston high schools and universities.

"But his charges weren’t limited to only the ones for trafficking. Recent breaking news, coming to us from our inside sources at the Boston Globe, say that Suh’s daughter y/n, who recently took over as CEO of S&L, provided information to the FBI in exchange for immunity. She found proof of the trafficking as well as election fraud committed by the governor.”

Your headshot is flashed on the screen, the same one that had been on the screen the night you’d ambushed your dad at the Prudential Center. You don’t have a lick of that confidence anymore, it’s been drained out of you, drop from drop. You can’t ever show your face in your home city again.

“That’s right, thousands of stolen ballots from the gubernatorial election from eight years ago were discovered in the company’s archives, all of them marking out votes for former congressman Jeffrey Jung, Sr.,” Baekhyun discloses, as a picture of Mr. Jung walking into the courthouse is shown. “Much of the uncovered plot was tied to the congressman, and early reports suggest this was a concerted effort to destroy his public reputation.”

That’s replaced with footage of Stephanie, hair disheveled, suit wrinkled, head hung low in embarrassment as she’s also escorted from her home in handcuffs, and Minseok’s voiceover rings out into the room,

“This was done under the instruction of his second wife, Stephanie Jung, who was also indicted today and escorted away by the Bureau. She was listed in the filings as the head of drug operations, the mastermind who had originally initiated the illicit activities after a related drug charge during her days at Harvard University.” 

The footage zooms out to show Mr. Lee being marched along right behind her, arrogant sneer pasted onto his face as double the number of agents surround him. “Also indicted was her brother, former S&L CEO Eugene Lee. His pending trial covers his charges for his involvement in the trafficking, commandeering the theft of official ballots from downtown Boston polling sites, and aggravated assault against his son, Minhyung.”

“There were a flurry of additional arrests following the indictments,” Baekhyun continues, as mug shot after mug shot are transposed onto the screen. “S&L CFO Henry Lau, Matthew Kim, Jr., and Ivan Lee, for transportation of illicit materials, Professor Matthew Kim Sr., from MIT, for tax evasion and conspiracy, numerous other S&L board members for conspiracy, the list goes on and on, too many involved for us to list them all by name.”

“Most interestingly, this circled back to a cold case out of Boston College from 2013,” Minseok takes over again, and your hand inadvertently twists into Jaehyun’s hair because you know what’s coming. “Gerald Lee, nephew of Stephanie and Eugene, was also arrested today for his involvement in the death of Congressman Jung’s eldest daughter, an incident that was kept extremely under wraps at the time. Lee was allegedly in possession _and_ under the influence of the illegal drugs found here today, and struck the congressman’s daughter with his car, killing her on impact. Businessman Albert Lee was charged with a related count for bribery that kept his grandson out of prison, though he is expected to make bail.”

“No one from the Suh camp has commented publicly, and there has been no information on the whereabouts of the governor’s two children beyond a statement provided by the FBI on behalf of Ms. Suh,” the report cuts to a video of Lucas, who reads out what the two of you had prepared together during one of your earliest meetings.

“I thank the Federal Bureau, the office of the Boston District Attorney, and the United States Attorney's Office for the District of Massachusetts for their work on this case. I would like to apologize to the victims of these crimes on behalf of myself and my brother, and wish all involved be brought to proper justice for their actions.”

“Massachusetts is prepared to enter the special election process, and with his presidential campaign now completely shuttered, the former governor is expected to go to trial later in the year,” Baekhyun concludes, letting you inadvertently know that you’ll be here in Atlanta at least until then. 

“This is like something straight out of a 1920s gangster movie,” Minseok observes in awe. “Very tragic for those involved.”

“You’re sure right on that one,” Baekhyun replies, and he can’t hide how shocked he is by it all. “I’ve never seen anything like this. My condolences to all the victims. Back to you, Lester.”

“Thanks guys,” Lester wraps up this segment of news. “We will hear from Theodore Lee, for his comments on his family’s involvement in this case, after the commercials. Later on in the broadcast, we will sit down with Senator Lau to discuss the theft of his personal fortune by those charged.”

As it cuts to a blood pressure medication commercial, you let out a shaky exhale. 

How had the chaos of your life been distilled into a five minute news report? It’d been summarized, sterilized, and regurgitated out into the public in the most bland way, to make it palatable for people to hear. They won’t know the undiluted sheer terror you lived in daily, they won’t know what it’s like to stare down the barrel of a gun twice, or watch your own father watch you get brutally assaulted. They get the facts, get to hate him without the scars, and will probably hate you too because you share his name.

It’s not over yet, either. Though the feds have rounded up a laundry list of criminals, you know that your father’s network had been far reaching. Even from their prison cells, your dad or Eugene could say the word and there’d be people on the hunt for you. You might not ever have another day when Sehun and Kai aren’t by your side to some capacity, when you won’t have to look over your shoulder in distress.

This whole time, you’ve only been focused on your personal victimhood, but you can’t do that anymore.

You don’t know how many thousands of lives were ruined by this whole thing. The kids who surely became addicted to the drugs and dropped out of school, or were arrested - especially with the unfair drug laws in this country. The people that were pulled into the trafficking operations themselves in order to survive, the unwitting S&L employees like Junmyeon who were laid off because they spent aimless time crunching numbers for a fake company, all those campaign volunteers who’d signed up to support a false candidate for president. Johnny, Wendy, the baby, Haechan, Mark, Jihyun, Jaehyun. Your mother. The seven million people of Massachusetts who would’ve been better off had those ballots for Jeffrey Jung, Sr. not gone missing seven years ago.

The domino effect is too large and too overwhelming to calculate. When presented with the reality of it all, you want to hide in this little Georgia house forever.

“Hey, sweetheart,” Jaehyun’s sleepy voice wafts up to your ear. “You were watching that?”

You look back up at the TV, which is now replaying the footage of your father’s arrest, and you quickly turn it off. You smooth a hand across his cheek, hoping he didn’t hear anything he didn’t want to. “I didn’t realize you were awake.”

“S’fine,” he yawns, then puts his hand over yours on his face. “Promise me something?”

You nod, and he murmurs, “Don’t let this get to you. Don’t think about it. Ever.”

He knows exactly how this will tear you up from the inside, how you’ll agonize and feel personally responsible as you have every minute since you found those ballots.

“Ever?”

“Unless called upon by the government. Or a higher power,” he jokes, but his eyes bore straight through you, insistent.

“Are you sure?” By making you promise this, he’s effectively closing off any avenue he has into having a civil discussion with you about what’s happened to him. After all, on that list of victims, his name is perhaps the one at the top.

“There’s nothing you can do to change it now,” he says as he sits up, taking your hand to kiss it. “So why let it affect you?”

He’s right, you’re at the point where there is nothing you can fathomably do. You can only hold the atonement in your heart and hope that one day you can repay it back a thousand fold. You’ll wait in this little Georgia house until then. 

“Okay. I promise,” you whisper.

Then you kiss him because you want to, and let him take you to bed, because he can, and when you sleep, you’re blessed with no dreams at all.

—

Jaehyun is slicing open a watermelon for you to share after your pool day when you randomly gripe, “I always knew the Hamptons were a fraud.”

“What?” He looks up from his sharp object-induced concentration, confused.

“I mean, we bought that house with drug money,” you use a hushed, comical tone to say it, which pulls out a giggle from him. “No wonder I never felt at home going there.”

He points at you with the knife, “You wouldn’t have met me without it.”

“I would’ve met you on the campaign trail either way,” you grumble, recalling how you always wanted to knock his stupid American flag pin off his lapel. Or would try to scuff his shiny shoes whenever you were in his proximity.

“Shut up and let me be nostalgic, okay?” He leans back in his kitchen chair, dreamy smile starting to unfold on his face.

“Nostalgic about what, hating me?” You sarcastically quip, knowing that those Hampton trips weren’t exactly fun for anyone.

“God, I really hated you.”

“I hated you!”

“You had no reason to hate me!” Jaehyun retorts back, falsely offended. “But you, you with your perfect grades and perfect everything, how many times did Dad tell me I should be more like you?”

“You hogged my bonding time with John,” you point out, because he did. “Never let me use the pool when you did, always knocked over my sandcastles.”

“I only had Jihyun to play with!” He plays the sister card so easily, though he’s only doing it to push at your buttons, but that’s not the only strike he has against him.

“You also purposefully excluded me from everything that you two got up to.”

Jaehyun holds out his arm, pearl bracelet still in its pristine spot on his wrist. “Again, Jihyun! I needed bro time!”

“You called me frigid witch because I wouldn’t hold hands with you during a game of red rover, and I was grounded for a day because Herbert found out I used the word bastard." You pull out your trump card, digging it in especially deep when you use Herbert to refer to him, as you had since his arrest. 

Jaehyun throws his head back and laughs, his warm merriment filling up your kitchen. “You got grounded for that?!”

“Yes, I got grounded!” You exclaim, still incensed at the fact that you got punished and he didn’t because he decided not to curse. “You really were so mean to me.”

“I was,” he admits cheekily, ears turning pink with embarrassment. “I called you a lot of shit behind your back.”

“Jaehyun!” You gasp, not wanting to imagine what sort of lewd and nefarious things he’d spewed when you weren’t around to hear.

“What you don’t know won’t hurt you!” He sputters, then he goes back to sternly chopping the watermelon. “We better tell our daughter to not take any shit from mean boys, though. Strong women don’t take shit, not that you did. We should definitely be the exception to that rule.”

The laughter dies in your throat, but not in a bad way. He references it so casually - he hasn’t even stopped his work to gawk at you like you’re gawking at him - that it seems like he’s been mulling over the thought for some time. That he’s been thinking about what your children would be like, that he’s been thinking about having a child in the future. And of course Jaehyun would be ultra feminist about his hypothetical daughter.

You tuck that sweet little note away for future referencing, not needing to get into the kids talk right now, and you get back to teasing him, “Well, Minnie asked me to hate you and so I did.”

“Of course she did, and of course you did,” he hefts the knife particularly strongly through the rind, and he lets out a sigh as he looks back up to you. “I’m sorry for that, by the way. At school I mostly kept seeing her because I felt like being close to her was like being close to you, which I guess I didn’t want to admit at the time. And when Mark invited me up for your formal, the prospect of being with you made me go cold towards her in a second. She freaked out and ended it.”

“I always wondered why that felt like it happened so fast,” you hum softly, thinking of how irked you were to see him outside of the SME house that night. “She said it seemed like you were pulling away. I didn’t realize it was because of me.”

He puts the knife down to run a hand through his hair. “We didn’t really have a chance to talk about Minnie. I guess I was probably a douchebag about it. I told her we slept together that morning in the Turks and she basically told us both to fuck off. She wanted to get back with me and I was so deep in it with you, I couldn’t bring myself to lie. I didn’t know that was going to end your friendship.”

“Ah, that’s why she hasn’t spoken to me since." You figured as much, based on her radio silence after the trip, but you hadn’t known he’d been that blunt about it.

“Are you mad?”

“Not really. I guess I broke girl code first,” you shrug as you snatch up a watermelon slice. “If we’re real friends, maybe I’ll have a message from her when this dies down. I know I’d text her if she was me.”

This sudden session of reminiscing has pierced your heart in a particularly aching way, and you sniff a little, rind digging into your skin as you hold the fruit tightly, “I miss her. I miss everyone. John, Wendy, the baby. I didn’t even get to say goodbye to them. Haechan, Mark. I miss him so much. I miss my mom. I want to hug her.”

You try not to think about it that much, how the boat of truth surrounding your parental lineage had been severely rocked. Even if that Sunny woman had been right, and you do end up actually being the child of those two people, your mother is still the woman who raised you. You hope that she’s okay after seeing all the news, wherever she is out there.

Jaehyun delicately takes the watermelon out of your hand, pressing his lips to the soft part of your skin by your thumb and says, “Me too. John and Mark were like my brothers, Chan too. And my dad, my dad I think about more than I think of myself.”

This is that kind of moment where you allow yourself to darkly accept where you're at. That despite all this grief has been rained down upon you, you have a scintilla of gratitude for your circumstances, because you ended up here with him. Because you understand each other. 

“Hey, hey! We’ve got beer!” Kai hollers as he walks through your open storm door, ending the moment but bringing the frivolity. 

Sehun chimes in, “And pie!”

“You’re right on time, the watermelon is done!” Jaehyun calls out to them and soon your kitchen is bustling with all four of you knocking back beers and shoving as much watermelon down your gullets as you can. 

Jaehyun keeps his hand firmly planted on your waist the entire time, his own poignant way of letting you know that everything is somewhat sort of okay. Because this is your life now, beers and watermelon, pool parties, and him here with you.

—

On a sweltering evening in the dog days of summer, you’re sweating over the stove making clam chowder for dinner. It’s Jaehyun’s favorite, he’s dropped it casually in conversation all week that he’s missed it even though it’s decidedly not soup weather in Georgia. 

So that’s why you’re here, slaving away in your hot ass house, open window by the oven not doing anything to alleviate your sweat. But it’s coming along nicely, seafoody and bubbling and smelling just like home. Jaehyun’s been out in the garden in the front yard for most of the afternoon, doing god knows what in the burning sun, and you knock on the window to get his attention.

“Hey, dinner is almost ready!”

He doesn’t turn at the sound of your voice, only continuing to work, sweat staining through the bright red tank top he has on. You’re really confused as to why he’s chosen today of all days to work in the garden, he’d planted the tomatoes earlier in the week and hadn’t mentioned anything else in his plans. But he’s digging, digging, digging.

“Did you hear me?” You raise your voice even louder. “Dinner is almost ready. I’m about to call Kai and Sehun.”

“Wait, don’t call them yet,” Jaehyun yells back at you, wiping at his sweat with the hem of his shirt in an exaggerated way that he uses to show his torso off. “Come out here for a second.”

“What’s going on that you don’t want to be eating clam chowder right now?” You strain to look past him, to see what he’s been doing, but you can’t make out anything past the bushes. 

“Just come out here, please?” He wheedles, sticking his bottom lip out, and the gesture convinces you easily.

You turn off the burner, mosey on out of the kitchen, and he’s waiting for you at the front door, blocking your view of the spot in the front yard he’d been in. He leans in to peck your cheek quickly, not wanting to get the sweat and dirt all over you, and then he steps aside and murmurs, “Happy twenty-second, sweetheart.”

At first you don’t see anything. Your eyes only come to focus on the bunch of jasmine you’d planted by your doorstep in honor of his mother, and the twin set of camellias, Jihyun’s favorite. Then, your chest explodes with loveliness when you lift your head and see what he’s done. 

He’s planted a field of lavender right into the middle of your yard. 

He must’ve bought dozens of small bushes at the greenhouse at town center when he went to pick up the tomatoes. He’s arranged the purple buds into an exact copy of the half circle of blooms that grew outside of your childhood home.

“It’s my birthday. That’s lavender,” you state dumbly, like you’re trying to make yourself believe what you’re actually seeing. You’d forgotten completely that it was your birthday, but apparently he hadn’t.

“It’s your birthday,” he parrots, jibing at you tenderly. “That’s lavender.”

Your mouth opens and closes like an idiotic fish, because Jaehyun has spent all day planting your favorite flowers in front of your home. He’s sweated and burned up in the summer sun just so you can have this and there is absolutely no one like him. You know the appropriate reaction is to squeal and kiss him, but you feel paralyzed, like your heart doesn’t even know how deeply it’s appreciated by another.

“Are you okay?” His brow furrows in concern as he soaks in your non-response.

All you mumble, quite beside yourself with feeling, is, “The soup’s gonna get cold.”

You rush back in the house, wiping your hands on your skirt and turning the burner back on so you can resume stirring, so you can have something to focus on that isn’t the incessant beating of your heart in your ears. Why are you reacting in this way? You already live together, kiss each other like besotted teenagers, share a bed with one another. This is no different, isn’t it?

“Hey, are you sure you’re okay?” Jaehyun questions carefully after he strolls back inside a few minutes later.

“Fine,” you hush out, foisting your attention back onto the spoon.

Jaehyun’s eyes narrow, like he doesn’t quite accept your answer, but then he moves on, “Do we have a cake leveler? Sehun asked Kai to ask me to ask you if you could bring it over before dinner.”

That’s good, that’ll give you enough time to properly compose yourself and thank him appropriately once you return. You rummage through the drawer and find the tool, showing it to him, “Yeah, I’ll go now. Can you stir the soup?”

He nods and you pass off the spoon to him to walk back to the front door. But before you go, it comes out of nowhere, “Thanks, I love you.”

Jaehyun’s stirring away without a care as his mouth echoes, “I love you, too.”

You catch yourself on the staircase banister. What in the fuck had you just said? Thanks… You can’t take another step closer to the door without confirming what you had just said. Thanks… No seriously, you need to know what you just said. Thanks…

Jaehyun does a double take as he looks up from the pot he’s working on, “Why aren’t you going? Sehun needs to level that cake, like now?”

“Did I just say I love you?” You whisper, more to yourself than to him, in complete incredulity at the sentence that had made itself known.

Jaehyun turns off the burner so he can lean back on the counter and softly grin at you, “Did you?”

Yes, you’re so in love with him, you’re so in love with this man, you’re a lovesick fool for him and really have been your entire adult life. He’d always meant something to you, something intangible, hard to name, sometimes even hard to feel. You’d wanted it to be nothing for the longest damn time, but you’re sure now that that something had been love. He planted you lavender, for fucks’ sake! He planted you freaking lavender. You’re in love with him.

“Yeah,” you chuckle in disbelief, cheeks pinking all the way through. “First time.”

And it absolutely does not go unnoticed how nonchalant he’d been about saying it in return, like it’d been second nature for him to do so. 

“I’ll love you forever,” he professes freely, unable to hide his beaming smile now. “But Sehun won’t if he can’t finish your cake before dinner.”

Your hand closes tightly around the cake leveler and you nod your head rapidly, then start to sashay out of the kitchen to head back to the door. But you’re stopped once again by what you’re itching to say to him. You turn back around, peeking out from behind the doorjamb to see him ladling the soup out, giddy grin in place as he bounces on the balls of his feet. You get this all to yourself now.

He glances up from what he’s doing, and he laughs, “What are you doing still here? Go!”

“I think I’m going to love you for longer than forever,” you blurt, honestly, truly, happily. “Thank you so much for the lavender.”

You match his effervescent smile with one of your own, and then you go. Sehun tells you to shut up no less than five times when you can't stop giggling while he finishes icing your cake, but you can't help it. Before the four of you eat the confection later, you all sing happy birthday, loudly and semi off-key, but only you and Jaehyun know what you’re truly celebrating. 

**tbc.**

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *usher voice* we're going nowhere fast, we've reached the climax, two chapters to go and a lot of plot still left to happen!!!!! 
> 
> i know this chapter was short but u deserved a bit of fluff after the trainwreck of the previous one! thank u for reading!!!!


	10. revelations

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> You take a deep breath, which doesn’t steady out your nerves at all, then start again, “I told you that I had a name in mind, but I wanted to see what you think before I go in.”

Life flows by in quite a hurry when you’re in love.

The two of you don’t exactly have the means to work, especially because that would involve long spans of time in public. You busy yourselves at instead, planting daisies and chrysanthemums in the growing flower patch in the front yard, pruning your apple tree, and adding a cucumber plant in next to the tomatoes. You bake up a storm and watch all six seasons of _Gossip Girl_ and spend an exorbitant amount of time listening to Sehun talk about his boyfriend back home in LA. You do start to see an agency-provided trauma counselor, which does your peace of mind more help than you’d thought.

Jaehyun works out in the backyard with the boys and you patch the holes that run through in his socks like you’ve been married fifty years. You cook gigantic amounts of curry while he reads through Harry Potter from start to finish, through the kitchen window you watch the trees start to change color with the advent of fall.

And one morning, after Jaehyun’s gone out to pick up some groceries, Kai and Sehun sit down with you at your kitchen table.

“Ma’am, we wanted to talk with you while Mr. Jung is out of the house.”

“Uh oh, Kai,” you joke as you push them their coffee cups. “You used your official voice.”

“It’s nothing bad, don’t worry,” his face transforms into softness when he can no longer keep up the stern outward appearance. “But it’s something we wanted to discuss privately with you, per protocol.”

You brace yourself, for the news that Herbert’s somehow getting off freely, or that Stephanie’s not going to have to go to jail or something that fantastically awful, when Sehun carefully probes, “Have you made any decision about changing your name?”

This had been one of the first bullet points listed carefully on your case file, a service that the FBI was offering to increase your anonymity while in hiding. But you know the real reason it had been slipped in there — in case you wanted to live your life free of the bond tying you to Herbert. You’d read that for its rights the first go around, but still hadn’t decided how you felt.

You really wish that John was here, so that your older brother could tell you what to do. You two had shared a name your entire existence, and it wouldn’t seem right to change it without him. But he is not in your life anymore, not really, and you’re not sure how long you can continue to dwell on this.

“No,” you shake your head, fiddling with the edge of a place mat. “Why, is there something wrong?”

“No, nothing of the sort,” Sehun affirms as he hands you a sheet of paper and explains, “Indigenous People’s Day is approaching, so the town courthouse will be closed. We were able to get in contact with the county judge and get him to agree to coming in on his day off to do this privately.”

The national holiday is in roughly a week, and you already know you’re going to be thinking about this every minute until then. “I see.”

“Just think about it, there’s no pressure. He said you could even decide that morning if you want to,” Kai offers, and that makes you feel a bit better, like you’re not being shoehorned into this decision.

“Okay, of course,” you agree, then notice they’re not getting up. “Is there more?”

“Obviously, it’s been no problem for us to accommodate Mr. Jung, but since you are the one officially listed on this case, that dignifies you with specific perks.”

“I think I’ve read that manual front to back. Living tax-free on the FBI’s money is enough of a perk,” you joke, because if you strip all the decorum away, you’re basically on an extended vacation with your boyfriend. Sure, you have to add in the lingering fear, anxiety, and trauma you’re working on, but it’s still a vacation.

“No, beyond that.”

“Okay.”

The two agents look at each other, and then Sehun ventures carefully, “You’re now allowed a protected visit from anyone you would like. Obviously, this can’t happen more than a handful of times because of security reasons. But now that things have settled out as the trial's about to begin, it’ll be relatively easy to transport your family here for a visit.”

Your breath seizes into itself. This can’t be what they’re really offering, right? “Anyone? My brother? Mark?”

Kai nods. “It’ll have to be one of them at a time, and it might be months before we could bring anyone else, but yes.”

How sweet it would be to have Johnny here. John’d love the obstacle course you have in the backyard, and Kai and Sehun are just like his old NCT brothers. Wendy probably wouldn’t be able to come because she must be close to having the baby soon, but you’d video call her, to see the nursery she’s surely set up. 

Or Mark. You’d be beside yourself with happiness to have Mark here. To squish his little face and tell him you’re sorry at least once and let him eat all the bananas in your house just because he loves them.

It’s Sophie’s choice, to pick between them, but you need to clarify, “Anyone, like _anyone_ anyone?"

“Yeah, anyone. Not like, Barack Obama, or that sort of thing, but anyone from your life,” Kai jokes, to liven the mood, and then he pats your hand. “You can think about this too, it can happen at literally any time unless we receive advance notice from headquarters. So, don’t feel like you have to decide right now.”

“It’s okay, I already know who I want.” You were being dramatic when you likened this to Sophie’s choice, because the name you scrawl out on Kai’s paper pops into your mind instantaneously.

Both of them read the name, and they share a glance that tickles your heart. “Okay good. We can work that out for you, then.”

“Wait! There’s one more thing,” you stop them before they can get up from the table and show them a different note you’d written a few days ago when the idea had sparked into your brain, “Can you help me look this up?”

You’re sure Kai knows the details of your case inside and out, but you’d only given Lucas the bare bones outline of this, nothing beyond what he needed to know.Thankfully, Kai doesn’t pry and only agrees, “Sure, this should be easy for us.”

That week goes by, you’ve moved onto _Breaking Bad_ , and the pumpkins are finally starting to sprout. The whole time your name weighs heavily on your mind. You waffle back and forth probably a million times, to keep it or not. Truly the only pros for keeping Suh as your last name are a) the fact that Johnny will likely keep his last name, and b) you truly have no idea what you would change your name to.

You wish your mom was here. You honestly can’t remember now if anyone ever referred to her as Mrs. Suh.

But the Monday you wake up to is absolutely gorgeous, the golden sun peeks through the curtains in a rainbow of balminess, and the maroon and orange leaves scatter themselves in a lazy fall panorama around the lavender patch under your window.

When you pour yourself your morning coffee, you spot an envelope left on your table by Kai. After putting your cup down so you don’t scorch yourself in the advent of an emotional breakdown, you quickly tear open the paper and frantically read through what he’d dug up for you. The leaflet slips through your fingers, breath hitching in astonishment when you realize what he’d found.

And that moment, you just know. You know what you’re going to do.

Sneaking back up to your room so you don’t wake up a peacefully slumbering Jaehyun, you pick out the first dress you see in your closet, this white cotton sundress with a bunch of purple grapes embroidered on the front pocket. After you’ve changed, and you’re pinning your hair back in an elegant braid, Jaehyun drowsily rises from his pillow, rubbing at his eyes. “Hey, you going somewhere?”

You’re satisfied by how much you look your age, look like the real you, and you glance at him over your shoulder, “I’m changing my name today.”

“Oh. Okay,” he sits up in surprise. “That’s a big one.”

You haven’t discussed it with him explicitly, but you know he’s read that suggestion in the case file and knows the gravity of what changing your name will mean.

“Yep.”

“How you feeling?”

“Like the textbook definition of mixed emotions,” you admit as you sink down at the edge of the bed. “But this is what’s right for me, I know it.”

He crawls over to you, to kiss you on the cheek, and you offer, “The judge is seeing me at eleven. You can come, if you want.”

“I’m offended you think I wouldn’t want to,” he chirps back at you lightly, and your heart nearly sings in joy when he picks out a matching button down to wear, white with those same purple grapes embroidered on the pocket.

The day is so nice you forgo driving for the thirty minute walk downtown to the pristine white courthouse. As you sit on the bench waiting for the judge to arrive, your knee bounces in anticipation that you can’t stop.

“You nervous?” Jaehyun asks, not even bothering to put his hand on your leg because he knows it won’t do anything.

“Yeah,” you breathe out. “A ton.”

But you’re not nervous in the way that he’s thinking, not at all.

“Don’t be,” he reassures you, calm and steady as always. “You could literally have no name and it wouldn’t matter. You know who you are.”

“Right, right.”

“Do you have a name you’ve been thinking about?”

“I uh, I have a name in mind. But I want you to look at this first,” you hand him the requested sheet of paper that had been in Kai’s envelope this morning.

You anxiously watch him read the printout, the jiggling of your knee skyrocketing, and the crinkles by his eyes deepen in confusion,“What is this? Public record of marriages performed in Massachusetts? There’s nothing on this page, it says _no record registered_.”

“Yes,” you confirm breathlessly, pointing out a part of the page he probably didn’t see at first. “Please look at who the search was for.”

His eyes squint to take in the tiny font, spelling out a search for _Minhyung Lee, Y/n Suh._

“Y/n, I don’t…” Jaehyun looks up at you and shakes his head. “I don’t understand.”

“Herbert and Eugene were fucking idiots, and never registered our marriage as legal,” you brusquely explain, hoping this is the last time this subject is brought up. “So, I am not married to Mark.”

But all that negative tension in your body dissipates when you see Jaehyun comprehend the implications of what you’ve shown him. You’re not married. You take a deep breath, which doesn’t steady out your nerves at all, then start again, “I told you that I had a name in mind, but I wanted to see what you think before I go in.”

He puts the papers down, listening intently. “Sure, go for it.”

You tuck a strand of hair behind your ear and shyly, with the prettiest blush blooming across your cheeks, you say, “The last name that I’d like to have is Jung. If you’d let me.”

Jaehyun’s mouth drops open, comically, fully.

You take in his surprised reaction and immediately go into blabbermouth mode, “Of course when we’re done with all this, we can do the whole shebang, huge ring, fluffy dress, John’s baby as the flower girl or ring bearer, your dad there, Mark there, whatever you want.”

You’re still kids, you haven’t even been dating or whatever this can be called for four months yet, but it would be a travesty if you never married Jaehyun. You seriously think the universe might weep. You take his hand, the boldest thing you’ve ever done, and then you lay it on him, “But we’re here at the courthouse. Shouldn’t we just get married?”

The tenderest smile in recorded history crosses his face at your words.

“Yeah. We should,” Jaehyun accepts in an instant, “but let me do this first.”

Very carefully, he dips his hand into the pocket of his shirt and pulls out a sprig of lavender. He must’ve picked it this morning on your way out, when you weren’t looking. Like he’s done once before, his warm fingers dance through your hair, pulling out one of your clips so he can twist the flower into your braid and pin it up for you. Just like that, your wedding dream has been fulfilled. You’re in purple and white, you have lavender in your hair, and you’re marrying the boy that you’d wished for on your twenty first birthday.

He lifts your hand to his lips, kissing the crest of your third knuckle. “Okay, let’s get married.”

“Hey,” you call down the hall to where Kai and Sehun are loitering by the door, “we need you.”

They come running in an instant, dual looks of concern pasted onto their faces, “Something wrong?”

“No,” Jaehyun looks at you in mirth, and he finishes your sentence, “but we need witnesses when we sign our marriage license.”

They squeal happily in unison, not like the hardened late twenties government agents they are, “We get to be in a wedding!” “I can’t wait to tell my mom!”

The judge heartily laughs when you tell him you need him to perform a marriage ceremony in addition to doing the legal name change paperwork. He tells you he’ll be telling his grandkids about this tonight. Kai cries throughout the proceedings as Sehun films, and when Jaehyun kisses you, you know you’ll be content to do that for the next seventy years.

—

Even though it’s the middle of November, it’s still warm enough for you to keep your windows open, and that allows you to catch the car pulling up to the driveway, sending your heart into a frenzy.

There’s a knock on the door, and you compose yourself enough to deceptively call into the living room, “Hey, can you get that? It might be Kai with the baguettes.”

“Sure, love!” Jaehyun hollers as he gets up from the couch, and you tiptoe over so you can watch it all unfold. He pulls the door open, and even from the side you see how he goes completely numb when he sees who’s on the doorstep.

“Jeff,” your guest greets him, and Jaehyun’s face breaks into this devastating expression of relief and joy.

“Dad?” He laughs in complete disbelief, unmoving in your entryway, “What, what are you doing here? When did you get here? _How_ are you here?”

“Thought I was going to piss my pants when the FBI came knocking at my door again,” the elder Jung says wryly. “Turns out I wasn’t going to jail, but to suburbia.”

“They can do that?! What!” Jaehyun finally breaks free from whatever had been holding him back, and scoops his dad up into a hug, twirling the older man around like he weighs nothing. “Oh my god, Dad, I can’t believe you’re here, come in!”

Jaehyun hits him with it as soon as they’ve walked into the kitchen, holding nothing back as he re-introduces you to his father, “You remember my wife?”

“Jeff?” Mr. Jung asks in shock.

“Dad?” He retorts.

“Nice to see you, Mr. Jung,” you acknowledge him politely, unsure of how he feels about you now, but you walk over to shake his hand anyways.

He brushes your hand away in favor of giving you a warm hug. “If I’m your father-in-law now, you at least have to call me Jeffrey. Come on, now. We’re northern people southern living!”

“Sure, Jeffrey,” you hug him again, because he feels so comforting, and he pulls back to look at you, tears already brimming in his eyes.

“You’ll have to let me insist on you two having an actual celebration when this is all over, your mother and sister would never let me live it down if I didn’t,” he says that last bit right to Jaehyun, who chuckles softly.

“Oh, don’t worry, y/n has had this planned out for years. What was it again? _I’d like to braid a bunch of lavender into my hair when I get married, and wear a dress that’s white and purple instead of just white_? Cream colored dresses for your bridesmaids? Vanilla cake with raspberry filling?” He imitates your voice by rising his to a higher pitch, but he’s given his affection away, in remembering every little detail you’d mentioned in passing.

“Shut up?” You swat at your husband with the dish towel, and he leaps out of the way.

“We could have it in Boston,” Jeffrey suggests without thinking, and when he sees your stiff smile, he amends. “Or, or here, if that’s what you want.”

It’s too early in the night to get into this, though you know it’s probably coming, so you block it out with a pleasant, “As long as you’re here with us, John and Mark, too, we could have it in Oklahoma for all I care.”

He laughs, and Jaehyun does too, their twin faces lighting up in the same way. After Kai actually drops off the baguettes, the three of you share fondue in the middle of the kitchen, catching up on everything that’s transpired in the months you’ve been away. You mostly sit back and let the two of them chatter back and forth, pleased to be back with each other once again.

Jaehyun must be so content with life, because he falls asleep on the couch while trying to find a movie like he’s prone to do. You and his father start the dishes in peaceful quietness.

You’re midway through cleaning a bowl when he volunteers, “Mr. Oh told me what you did, that you gave up your prearranged visit so that I could see Jeff.”

You smile, because you’d predicted this. “Diving right in, huh?”

“Politician at heart, sorry.”

You look back over at Jaehyun’s sleeping form and shrug, “You don’t have to tell him.”

Jeffrey joins you in gazing at his son, “I think he already knows. And really, thank you. It must’ve been so hard for you to turn down a visit with your brother.”

“I mean, he makes me so unbelievably happy. Like, more than I’ve ever been. And how selfish would I be if I wanted to take that all for myself?” You marvel out loud, letting him know how easy that decision had been. You drop your head right after, the contriteness billowing into your voice. “I’m so sorry about your wife, and, and your daughter. I know I can never apologize enough for how awful things were—,”

He puts a hand over yours, reaching down into the soapy water of the sink to quiet your impending panic attack, “Shh, shh. You were a kid. There’s nothing to be sorry for. You will definitely not want to read what I’ve said about Herbert to the press, but I’m sure you can give me a pass for that one now?”

Jeffrey is kind enough to no longer view you within the constraints of your family, but perhaps he never actually had. He indeed was always nice to you, always asked after your schooling and your wellbeing, even on the campaign trail. His phrasing makes you think of Jaehyun, who’d been so against your apologies that he’d nearly made himself sick with anger.

“He’s so like you, it’s almost scary,” you admit, glancing between the pair of men in your house.

“And you’re not like him at all,” Jeffrey returns. “You’re just like her.”

Your hand slips on the sink handle. For someone to say it, to actually voice it out loud, finally gives you a bit of hope. Hope that you haven’t been poisoned from the inside out, that you haven’t been ruined. You’ve been working on expelling those ugly thoughts, by building your life here with Jaehyun, by changing your name, but they’d lingered. Would you ever be able to shed the shroud of Herbert, be able to walk freely without being judged for who you used to be? Would you ever truly know if you were some bastard affair’s offspring, to not have that possible truth hanging over your head like a leadened weight?

But Jeffrey Sr. didn’t look at you and think of Herbert, he looked at you and thought of _your mother._ Your real mother.

“You knew her?” You ask, completely surprised.

“Yeah, briefly,” he nods, wistful smile on his face just like his son’s. “Nicest woman I’ve ever met.”You sit back in a silence of remembrance, and then he informs you, “I’m going to say something blunt.”

You’ve already dipped your toe into that subject, what’s more? “Sure.”

Jeffrey’s mouth tightens grimly as he concedes, “I still can’t believe he married a waitress, knowing who he was. I wasn’t shocked when they got divorced. Was shocked when you and John stayed with him.”

As a little girl, when you’d think about story of your parents’ relationship, you were sure it was the pinnacle of romance. Handsome hotshot Harvard grad meets beautiful starving artist and they fall in love. What more could you possibly want?

But you hadn’t had all the details fleshed out, that the union had been borne out of some type of lust, not love. That Herbert had been looking for a warm body to occupy his bed and a trophy wife to present to the public, to complete the ideal family unit. That your mother had been a placeholder for Herbert until Stephanie came crawling back out of the gutter.

“Me too,” you whisper, now that hindsight is everything. “Me too.”

“I don’t know what your relationship has been like with her has been like all these years, but I think the blindest man on the planet could see how much she loved you. And you’ve turned out like this because of her,” he offers up honestly, probably thinking of his own parenthood, his late wife, all of it wrapped up into a sad package.

“You’re the closest thing I have to a parent right now, so can I ask you a question?” You blurt, wiping your hands on the towel to brush away the hair that’s fallen into your face.

“Of course.”

“Are things really going to be okay?” You question him desperately, like he’s an all knowing oracle and not your husband’s father, like you used to ask your parents about Santa as a child. “Like truly okay? I think they are, but I really need an adult to tell me so.”

You’ve wished you were his child too many times in the past half a year, more than you ever thought you would. There you are, so far gone from the girl who’d called him names behind his back, waiting with bated breath for advice from him.

He shrugs, more forlorn than confident, “I don’t know. Everything is so awful all the time, you were right about that.” Then, he lowers his voice into a whisper, “Can I tell you something? Something I can’t tell Jeff?”

“Of course,” you shakily answer, nervous because he’s going to entrust you with information he can’t tell his own son.

“Sometimes I can’t help but think this whole thing was my fault,” Jeffrey Sr. admits, leaning heavily onto the sink counter. “I had no idea that they viewed my advances in life as their disasters, but maybe if I was a better friend, I would’ve realized it, been more empathetic.”

“You had no way to control them,” you offer, because it wasn’t his job to police the feelings of Herbert and the others, it was to no fault of his that he was successful and they weren’t.

“It’s not just that. Jasmine was the love of my life. I didn’t know I was capable of loving someone so fully until I met her, until we had Jihyun and Jeff,” you have never before in your life heard a grown man this emotional, but he is, swirled through with despair and repugnance, “But I have to admit it to you now, as hard is it is to do so, that Stephanie was my first love. In college, she was with Herbert and I pined away all four years, and that totally destroyed all my rational decision making.”

You’d picked up bits and pieces of this from the final encounter in your house, but to hear it from his mouth is much more terrible, “I found out that senior fall about what she and Eugene were doing with the weed in her apartment. All I could think was that she was ruining her life. I came up with a plan; if she saw me as someone who could rescue her from that kind of situation, someone who could be a safe haven for her, she’d finally want to be with me. So, I reported her, because I thought she’d be able to get help if I did. I was ready to support her through it, to be her knight in shining armor. And well. Well, you saw what happened after that.”

It’s not up to you to condemn his actions as misguided or offensive, but this never should have escalated in the way that it did. Sure, some blame could be placed on Jeffrey’s shoulders, but the true condemnation should be saved for those who took it too far.

You nod. “I did.”

“I didn’t think twice about her after she was expelled, because I met Jasmine at a Harvard-MIT political science mixer that fall break and never looked back. Like I said, she was the love of my life. I’m going to pass on to my next life begging the universe to put me back with her,” Jeffrey is the paradoxical icon of emotion, body stoic but tears freely spilling down his cheeks. “But the universe was too cruel in this life. There was no reason for Jasmine to get cancer, to go when she did. There was no reason for Stephanie to come back.”

He turns his head away from you, so he’s speaking to the wall instead of your face, and you know it’s because he is filled to the brim with regret, “When she did, she was so different, with a new face and a new name and new religious convictions, but she was still the girl who I’d loved in college. And I regret that the most. If I hadn’t been so blind, so hopeful for a second chance at happiness after my beloved wife passed away, then maybe Jeff wouldn’t have had to suffer like this. Maybe Jihyun would still be here with us.”

This is a level of introspection that no person should go through, to wonder if their heart’s actions led to their own child’s demise. You’re purely heartbroken for him, you have no idea how to express that.

“Jeffrey, I—,”

“You don’t have to say anything, hon. These are my sins to bear. You can say sorry and that it’s not my fault all you want, but it’s on me,” he rubs a heavy hand across his heart, and glances back at the couch. “I deal with it myself so that Jeff doesn’t have to.”

You recognize what the congressman’s doing. He’s taking the fall, he’s giving the crimes what he thinks is necessary context, because he still sees the good in them. Still sees them as his friends from Harvard. But he doesn’t need to do that. Their appalling actions had been their own. And just like you can’t bear to see Jaehyun sad, seeing his dad like this is somehow even worse.

“No,” you blurt, darting a hand out to hold his. You shake your head, “No, don’t deal with it yourself. If you can’t tell Jae, you can tell me.”

You are the only other person in this world who can understand what he’s going through. If he doesn’t want to deaden his son down with the emotional burden, you’ll take it every time.

He squeezes your fingers. “Y/n, it’s hard to answer what you’ve asked after all that’s gone on,” he starts, the revelation dark and reflective. However, when he spots his son again, snoring away on the couch, Jeffrey’s face lights up entirely, “But Jeff and I, we’ve got each other, we’ve got Jasmine and Jihyun from beyond. And now we have you. So, I think we’ll be okay.”

At your real wedding, Johnny will walk you down the aisle for sure. But maybe Jeffrey would like to have the father-daughter dance.

—

The Leo DiCaprio _Romeo + Juliet_ is blasting on your TV when your agency-issued phone starts to ring, and Kai’s official voice comes through the speaker,“Ma’am, you are receiving a phone call from headquarters. I will be connecting you.”

This isn’t anything unusual, you’ve had dozens of phone calls with Lucas since you’ve been here in Georgia. But, this time, the voice on the other end is definitely not Lucas’s.

“Y/n?”

“John? Johnny!” You scramble up off the couch as if that will help your ears, this is the first time you’ve heard your brother in literal months.

“Y/n, oh my god,” your brother breathes out in awe. “It’s you.”

You will definitely carry this panic around for a long time, because you immediately probe, “John, are you okay? Are you okay?!,” thinking he's calling because something bad has happened.

“Yeah, I’m fine, I promise. Wendy’s fine, too. We’ve been under the FBI’s security watch since the indictment,” he replies calmly, not even approaching a fraction of your anxiety level.

“Me too.”

“Yeah, in bumfuck nowhere, right?”

“Yeah, like you wouldn’t even believe. So, everything’s okay? They just let you call?”

“Yes, but sorry to jump right into it, but there’s something we need to talk about.” Now that, that is the first bit of concern you’ve been able to pick up from Johnny in the call.

“Sure.”

He takes a shaky, deep breath, and then asks, “Why aren’t you coming back to Boston for the sentencing?”

No. Sehun promised. _He promised._

“They told you?” You whisper angrily, stalking out of the living room before Jaehyun can catch onto your conversation.

You thought Kai, Lucas, and Sehun had all been on the same page that Johnny wasn’t going to be informed about your plans to not return until the day of the sentencing. When it was too late for him to call you like this.

“I’m making a statement,” he tells you, though you’ve already been informed of his plans. “Mark is against Eugene as well. It’d be only right for you to make one, but you weren’t listed in the case file.”

“You have to understand why that might not be good for me.”

“I don’t know, we’re all doing it even though we don’t want to. Not doing so comes off kind of shady and disloyal,” Johnny accuses you without thinking, and you have never been so instantaneously angry in your life.

“You wouldn’t dare,” you utter harshly. “To call me that.”

“Fuck. I’m sorry, I didn’t mean it,” Johnny tries to backtrack, realizing his mistake as soon as the words have left his lips, but he’s too late because you’re already on him.

“I had it a thousand times worse than you, even had it worse than Mark, and it was all because my life was in the public eye. I put myself and my reputation on the line for you and this is what happened.”

You’ve held in your resentment towards him for pushing you to do this, for asking you to take over S&L even though you’d agreed, and you’re unleashing it all now.

“I struck a deal with the FBI, yes, but there’s a non zero chance the citizens of Boston will have me drawn and quartered the moment I step off the plane at Logan. I’ve done more than I should, I was the one who discovered the election fraud, I gave up so much of the company’s information. Without me the FBI wouldn’t have even had confirmation of Stephanie’s involvement!”

You lean against the hallway heavily, thinking of how many sleepless nights you and the court-appointed lawyer stayed up over video call, “I even agreed to testify by mail because they thought it would be too much of a public frenzy for me to appear for the trial. Would it really be a crime if I chose to sit this one out for my own well being?”

“Y/n, I’m sorry—,” he attempts an apology one more time, but you can’t be yelling at him like this, not when there’s other people in the house.

“I should go before this turns into a fight. I’ll ask and see if I can call you back sooner than later,” you conclude the conversation dully, clicking the connection dead so you can press your head into the wall.

It had already been the hardest effort of your life to avoid obsessively following the trial details during the long winter months. You’d actually cancelled your cable subscription just so you wouldn’t have CNN, and you limited yourself to writing your testifying statement with your lawyer, turning it all off afterwards. Even when you’d been informed of Herbert’s unanimous guilty verdict, you’d only nodded perfunctorily at Sehun and went on making your croissants. But maybe that approach had been totally wrong.

“Why aren’t you going back for the sentencing?” Jaehyun interrupts your thoughts, and when you look at him in confusion, he shrugs, “Sorry, John’s loud.”

“You can’t think it would honestly be good for me to go to Boston and see all of them, especially Herbert,” you point out, because you thought you had the same sort of understanding. “Would you? You already know I testified through a letter.”

Jaehyun gets nervous, hands fiddling at the hem of his v-neck, “I don’t know, I wrote a statement against Stephanie for the prosecutors already. I was going to bring up going home to you this week.”

He, he what.

“You didn’t tell me you did that.”

“You didn’t tell me you turned down the sentencing!” He flings it back at you, suddenly escalating this into a fight. “We’re married, you gotta tell me this stuff!”

“Forgive me for thinking you wouldn’t want to hear about me continuing to agonize over publicly condemning the man who ruined your life,” you bite out sarcastically.

Jaehyun actually has the audacity to look surprised, “You’re what?”

You’re even more surprised at his surprise, “Is it really so hard to believe that I’m having a tough time with this? I wouldn’t be struggling with the decision if this was just for Stephanie and Eugene.”

“I mean, it’s logical. Herbert’s a criminal, was found guilty, and should go to jail,” he points out in a matter-of-fact way that divulges how little he understands the nuance of what you’re going through.

“Yes, Herbert’s a criminal, he’s committed numerous atrocities and will be in jail for a long, long time,” you echo him before you dive deep into your personal trough of fuckery. “But tell me, honestly tell me, if you were in my position and your father was already guilty and being sentenced to prison, maybe for the rest of his life, a man that you loved so dearly for so long. That you’d look him in the eyes and strike him down without a moment’s hesitation.”

Jaehyun freezes, contemplating the scenario you’ve presented him with, and you catch the slight tremble in his pupils. You’ve been a direct witness to how much the two Jeffreys love each other, Jaehyun would be a complete clown if he told you now he’d have no problem driving a stake right through his father’s heart. Which is what they’re asking you to do by making a final statement before the judge hands Herbert’s sentence down.

“You can’t! Can you?” You exclaim once his doubt is palpable. “Because you know that under the fucking mob boss or whatever he’s become, that there is still some sick part of him that I continue to view as my father."

You can call him Herbert all you want, but his presence taints your life, even now with your new last name. If you know your husband, he’ll understand that and cave and hug you like he’s always done. But what you get instead is a tense statement, him not quite making eye contact, “I never wanted to say you owed me anything, but this, this could be something.”

You think Jaehyun’s kidding at first, but when you look at him, like really look at him, he’s totally serious. He wants you to do this to satisfy the emotional debt you seem to still be paying off, even now.

“You’re gonna pull that card. Okay,” you exhale lowly, sweeping a hand through your hair. “I knew you weren’t okay with this.”

“That’s not fair,” he tries to protest, but you cut him off.

“Not fair? I’ve given you a thousand chances to talk about this with me but you always turn me down because you don’t want to make me feel bad. You’re a people pleaser, Jae, you want to be the hero and that doesn’t work for this!”

He tenses up at your certainly accurate description of him, “I was trying to let you do what you want.”

You’re frustrated that it’s come to this when there was no reason for it to, “No, what I wanted is for you to scream at me and fight with me, so we could get it all out. I don’t get why you bottle it all up! You don’t always have to take the high road and make me feel bad for not doing so.” You’ve been scared of this exact moment, the moment where he could hold it in no longer, and you have to ask to make sure, “Will you hate me if I don’t do it?”

“I—,” he undoubtedly has some platitude prepared, and you can’t have that.

“Answer without the fluff. Will you hate me?”

Jaehyun glances at you extremely guiltily, like he thinks he shouldn’t have even brought it up, then whispers, “No.” But he doesn’t immediately reverse course, take back his demand or otherwise set it right. You can tell by the way his neck flexes with tension that he’s trying his best to assuage his own doubts.

“Even still, you think that I owe you this,” you blandly point out the truth. “Because there’s still a part of you that blames me. Okay.”

He doesn’t deny it, and that's all you need. You immediately blow past him towards the entryway of your house, putting on your shoes and jacket as fast as you can.

“Hey, where are you going?!” He shouts after you, too slow in his attempt at blocking your path.

“Out!”

He points an accusatory finger at you, “You agreed we’d talk about this if it ever came up!”

You sigh exasperatedly, hand on the door, “Yeah, I agreed we’d talk, what I didn’t account for is you guilt tripping me to this point. Or you making me feel like the shittiest person ever!”

When he steps back in dismay, that gives you the perfect opportunity to exit the house, running your way down the sidewalk without waiting for him or either of your guards. You need time alone, even though you’ll probably pay for it later.

You don’t go that far, either, only to the winter market that runs in the church parking lot at the end of your block. It’s as stereotypical as you can get, vendors shouting their prices, the area loud and bustling, and the wind in your hair and the chilled February sun on your face. There are beautifully colored fruits everywhere, delicious baked treats on tables, and homemade wreaths and trinkets decorating the stalls.

You don’t have any money, you’re not really here to buy anything, but the presence of strangers makes you feel less alone as you walk along the booths. It’s not fair, for him to ask that of you, to try and use his personal pain to get you to do something that terrifies you. You’d rather him blamed you outright than go this route. This is something you could’ve talked about. But by Jaehyun framing it in that way, that you _owed_ him, that had been too far over the line.

You perhaps understand the phrase _love is foolish_ now, because you’re so angry at him, so, so angry. But you still find yourself walking to the stall that sells that cranberry jam he likes, because you’d noticed he was running low.

However, your feet concrete themselves into the grass when you see a figure bent over the table that sells those jams. Have you suddenly fallen ill? Because what you’re seeing can only be described as a fever-induced mirage.

“Mama?”

**tbc.**

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> cliffhanger of the century! lol
> 
> i cannot believe we have one more chapter left, thank you as always for reading xoxoxoxo


	11. calm seas

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It’s just in your blood, protecting your family. Your real family.

Your own voice is so faint in your ears, you’re momentarily afraid you’ve gone deaf, too.

The woman’s bob flutters around her face as she looks up at the sound of your voice, and then she staggers back from the table, “Y/n?”

There’s absolutely no way, this must be a vision, some kind of simulation you’ve been thrown into. Because there’s no way this woman has exactly the same features as the woman you remember, only tenderized by age. There’s no way this woman knows your name.

“Mama? Mama? Is that really you? Is this a movie?” You mutter to yourself, wondering if you’re being pranked. You ask her, “What are you doing here?”

Her hand is trembling by her side as she stays rooted to the spot, taking all of you in. “I’ve lived here for years. Since the divorce. What are you doing here?”

“Witness protection,” you blurt, because you can’t think of any other excuse, and the moment she laughs you know this is real. No other woman on this planet has a laugh that enchanting.

“I guess they like their southern locales,” she says as a figure runs up to you on the grass.

“Y/n? Y/n? There you are.” You reluctantly tear your eyes away to see Jaehyun there, red-faced and panting, Kai right at his heels.

“How’d you know?” You ask in wonder, because you could’ve gone anywhere from the house, and it’s clear he’s chased after you and found you right away.

“I was getting low on cranberry jam,” he mumbles, and he looks past you in confusion to who you were talking to.

“Mama,” you murmur, feeling like you’re floating away from your body, and you grab Jaehyun’s hand. “This is my husband.”

You can feel Jaehyun’s fingers flex around yours in surprise at the name you say. But it’s the woman’s reaction, how her eyes start to water in astonishment, that tugs you apart completely, “You, you’re married?”

“I am. John is too,” your voice breaks, a tear slipping down your cheek. “John’s even having a baby.”

Both of her hands go to cover her mouth, her own tears spilling over in a flood of unbridled joy. You want to hug her, to wipe at her face and tell her that it’s okay, but you’re afraid to touch her, afraid that she’ll be revealed as a hallucination if you do so. Something your mind’s conjured up as a defense response to the fight you’d had.

“Do you want to come home with me? See my house?” You ask, then turn to Kai and beg before she even answers. “Can she, please?”

“Yes. Only until nightfall, though,” Kai relents, softly smiling in understanding as he then divulges, “We’ve been ready for this, since the start of your case. ”

It won’t be a lot of time, but it’ll be enough.

She nods tentatively, and you take her shopping bag to carry it for her as you walk. She should be like a stranger to you, she’s been out of your life for more years than she was in it, but she could never actually feel like that. She’s still as beautiful as ever, with the same kind eyes, and there’s Johnny’s nose, and you’re desperately trying to pick out your facial features in her, wanting to believe Jeffrey Sr.’s words that you are all her.

“What’s your name?” She tentatively asks Jaehyun, towards the end of your walk home.

He sticks out his hand, shaking hers warmly, “Jaehyun, ma’am, it’s lovely to meet you.”

A flicker of recognition crosses her eyes. “You’re Jeffrey Jung’s boy, right?”

“Yeah.”

“Same smile,” she observes, and then she gently takes his arm. “I was so devastated to hear about Jihyun, especially after what happened with Jasmine.”

There’s that reminder that your parents have known each other for that long, that it seems like you and Jaehyun had been destined for each other for that long. He glances back at you before giving his simple response, “Thanks.”

You swing your arms out like you’re a game show presenter and you proclaim, “This, this is our home. Well, not technically ours.”

She gives the dwelling a polite once over. But you cannot miss the way her eyes lock right into the patch of lavender by your front door, how she takes in nothing else in but that, how the watery strain returns back to her eyes.

“Come in, ma’am,” Jaehyun offers her his arm again, and together, the three of you step inside.

He makes himself scarce immediately, to give you two some alone time, and the bedroom door isn’t even fully closed behind him before she asks, “So, what’s going on?”

“Nothing,” you respond out of habit, and the second clue you get that this is all real is the way she purses her lips. The same way she used to whenever she caught you or Johnny in a lie.

“I’m your mother. I know,” she calls you out as she takes off her scarf, lowering herself down onto a chair at your kitchen table.

You sigh heavily, “They want me to give a statement at Herbert’s trial. I’m not sure if I can.” You catch the look of astonishment that crosses her face at that, “What?”

“It’s so strange to hear you call him that,” she admits. “I thought that you’d always be a daddy’s girl.”

“I was, until I wasn’t,” you admit in return, and you don’t even know how to begin broaching this subject.

But your mom senses this apprehension like she’d done earlier. This must be that mother’s instinct because she dives right in, “Okay, listen to me. When I left Herbert, there were so many reasons propelling me to do so. The archaic arranged marriages he expected so you wouldn’t end up with someone like me, the affair he started with that girl from Harvard, how he was grooming John for takeover and keeping you under his spell. He really only saw both of you as props for the perfect upper class life, as heirs to his family name, and I never wanted that for either of you. The decision boiled down to the fact that I needed to protect my family.

“I was still in love with him, the way I was when we met at the restaurant for the first time, the way I was when he’d proposed after we found out I was pregnant with John. But I loved you two more. I started standing up to him more, and making secret plans to run, but he found out somehow and blindsided me with the unilateral custody agreement. So I ran, and all I could do was pray every day you two stayed safe.”

This is unexpectedly raw and real, and both of you are already crying as she tells you the truth of their divorce, all these years later, “Of course, every day it feels like I failed, that I couldn’t bring you with me. But he had the money and the name and the prestige, and I had nothing. Grandpa couldn’t even afford a lawyer for me, let alone the legal fees.”

She’d been a waitress and art teacher when they met after his graduation, not one of his rich Harvard girlfriends. That only worked to her disadvantage in her divorce from a powerful husband, all her autonomy as a mother stripped from her in the legal proceedings. She hadn’t given you up out of choice, she’d had to. You haven’t seen your grandfather in that long, either, and you hate Herbert even more for taking those years away from you.

“But you, you have the leverage now. Is what you’re doing protecting your family?”

You shake your head despondently, “I don’t know.”

She answers your darkest question without you even asking it, “I carried you in my belly for nine months, knew the best of you as a child, but you really turned out more than I could have ever imagined.”

That is the most relieving thing you’ve ever heard in your life. That you’re still preciously hers, that you’re not some bastard product of an affair between Herbert and Stephanie. You’d been too afraid to speak on your worry, to venture into finding out or seeking help on the matter, so you’d held it in every day, ticking and consuming. Now you can cast it off your deck into the depths of the sea. That’s one worry of your life you won’t divulge to her.

She reaches out, and her warm fingers close around yours. “Harvard, I expected, but you have the most thoughtful heart.”

“You can tell that?” You marvel, because you’ve been together with her for less than an hour, most of which has been you overwhelmed with dumbfounded shock that she’s actually here with you.

“The papers called you CEO Suh, and I just knew that you took over for John. That was because of the baby, I presume?” Her voice cracks freely, eyes scrunching with pain as you nod and she fits it together.Her worst fears have come true, and she presses a shaky hand to her forehead as she goes on, “And that little bit, with Eugene Lee’s boy? How they forced you two to get married? Was that?”

“Yeah, that was true.”

“The best thing this ordeal has done is put you in the papers. Every minute detail I’ve read about you is what I’d hoped you’d become,” she acknowledges sadly, in between dabbing at her eyes with a tissue. “You’ve protected your family a thousand times over, it would not be a knock against you to not go back to Boston. Ever again. I never have.”

“Oh, mama,” you weep, because this is the first validation you’ve gotten from anyone that you'd done the right thing in making the ultimate sacrifice.

That is why Johnny’s phone call had hurt so deeply.

Because you had been unfailingly loyal. You had thrown yourself to the concrete covered in blood for Mark, had put aside your future so John could have his, had stared down the barrel of a gun and gotten shot at for Jaehyun. You’d put yourself in harm’s way at the office to dig out evidence, had memorized every gruesome detail of Stephanie and Herbert together, had agonized and testified and done it all for them.

You used to think your loyalty to your family was one of your biggest flaws, how you’d go down swinging to defend their honor, how affected you used to get by it — to the point where it ruined relationships for you. But truly, it is the best part of you, the part that you’ve inherited from your mother.

It’s just in your blood, protecting your family. Your _real_ family.

“Ma’am, we should get going before it gets dark,” Kai tentatively interrupts as he peeks in from the front door. You know that for her safety, they have to get her back to her home before the sun fully sets.

“We got lucky that our last goodbye wasn’t permanent. This one can’t be, either." Her hug is the strong sanctuary of protection you never want to leave, she squeezes you with every little bit of care she has in her.

“Of course not. I’ll see you when I can. We have so much to talk about." You have years of boy talk to catch up on with your mom, especially now that you’re married.

Speaking of boy talk, your mother wistfully sighs as she takes in her surroundings one last time, “You have a lovely house. That lavender patch, in the front. Did he plant that for you?”

You suppose you’ll learn this for yourself in the future, but every mother’s wish is to see their child happy. And the lavender patch is all your mom needs to know that you’re happy, that you’re happy here with Jaehyun.

“Yes, mama.”

“Oh, y/n,” she stands up to cup your face lightly, thumb running over the scar that’s barely present on your face anymore. “I love you.”

You bury yourself into just one more hug, the most comforting place you’ve ever been, finally where you belong, and you whisper, “I love you, too.”

You watch her go in Kai’s car until you can no longer see it on the street, and then you go running up the stairs, bursting into the room where Jaehyun is reading in bed, comforter tucked into his chest.

“I’m sorry. For earlier,” you apologize earnestly, because you cannot be happy if he isn’t.

He puts down his book, pulling you down on the bed beside him so he can hold your hand, “No, I’m sorry. I was being selfish. Of course I understand how something like that might wreak havoc on your mental health.”

You’re already at a point of mutual understanding, but you need this to be banished from your house for good, “Jaehyun, I, I would like you to say everything you’ve never said to me about how you feel about me and Herbert. I need you to do it now.”

“Oh,” he stutters, expression going a little gaunt, and then he nods. “Um, okay.”

His gentle hands shift you, so you’re leaning into him and he can’t see your face, and then he softly launches into it, “It started off as a family thing, you’ve probably been able to tell. Dad and I never talked about mom, never talked about Jihyun, because we could never handle it, the sad looks and the mock sympathy. The issue of you was the same for me.

“I told you in Virginia that I’d never see you in that light. That wasn’t totally true, though, because there was already a moment when I had. The moment Herbert and Stephanie stepped into your house that day, there was a tiny second, only a second, where I hated you with every little part of me because I realized you’d been keeping it a secret. I thought you’d known all along. It was like we were teens in the Hamptons again, barking at each other for having the wrong family name, all trust we had built up completely vanished. At that moment, I thought I could never loathe a human as much as you.”

You try not to stiffen against his chest, because you know he’d opened his heart to you anyways. But it still hurts, to hear confirmation that you had made him feel like this.

“Of course, I didn’t know then what I know now, the full extent of how you’d been trapped and beaten down and abused to get to that point. But you can’t fault me for a natural reaction. I’m going to hate your father forever for what he did, Stephanie and Eugene too, that’s the truth of it. I doubt you would want me to change my mind about that. But the hate I had for you lasted for only a second. I was so ashamed at myself that I went the complete opposite way, I never wanted you to talk about it again. I didn’t want to risk hating you like that again, because I felt like such a hypocrite. I wanted it to never come up again because I would’ve done it exactly the same way.

“I’ve seen it, the fact that you still hold the worry that one day I’ll look back and decide that you were somehow the root of it all. But I won’t, because you weren’t. You don’t have to think of yourself as his daughter anymore. You’re your mother’s child only. You’re John’s sister, his baby’s aunt. You’re Mark’s best, best friend. You’re my wife _._ You're the one who saved us all.”

You let him go on, uninterrupted, his words impassioned with the transparent truth, and you are absolutely shocked by his concession, “So don’t go to the sentencing if you think you can’t handle it. I’ll send my statement, and maybe you can send something written along if you want, but you’ve done all you can. You don’t owe them, or me, anything else.”

You finally turn back to look at him, your husband, with his glassy eyes and trembling mouth overwhelmed with emotion. He’d found it in his heart to love you, even with all of the shit your family had thrown at him, but had been just as broken and confused and traumatized as you. Your grief isn’t a competition. You both have lost everything in different ways, but still came together in a tight braid of healing affection.

You know now that the only way you can banish this out of your house for good is for you to stare down the devil with Jaehyun at your back.

“I’m going to the sentencing,” you decide, voicing it firmly, in an echo of the fierce you in your heyday. “This will be the last thing I have to do.”

Jaehyun pinches your cheek fondly, thankful smile tugging at his lips. “There’s my girl.”

—

You’re standing at your hotel’s window, looking out into the sparkling night lights of Boston, when you hear the door open.

“Hey, did you get garlic kn—,” you call back at Jaehyun, who’d gone out to get pizza, and every little part of you explodes when you see that he’s not only brought back dinner. “Marky.”

The moment Mark lifts his cap, pushes back his hair, and addresses you in that familiar way, “Hey, baby gorl,” you burst into an embarrassing amount of tears. He runs over, putting his hands on your shoulders so he can gape right in your face, “Are you crying?!”

You gape back at him, beside yourself to see all the cuts on his skin have completely faded, “Are you not!?”

“I thought I was coming here to hang out with Jae, have I been hoodwinked? Bamboozled?” Mark laughs out loud, so much of the old him coming out right now, and the two of you embrace tightly in the middle of the hotel room.

You hold his hand with a death grip, ruffling his hair as many times as you want because he’s finally back here with you. Mark looks between you and Jaehyun with a sly grin, and puts on a haughty air, “So, I heard you cheated on me with him. But that’s okay, because I also cheated on you.”

You already knew that he and and Haechan had their personal halo of affection. But when you look down to his hand on yours, there’s a small silver ring on the fourth finger of his left hand.

“You guys got married?” You ask in surprise.

“Yup, quick thing at city hall with John and Chan’s parents. Sorry you missed it, but we really felt like we wanted to do it,” he admits in a soft voice, and you can’t even be mad, because you’d done the same thing.

“Sorry you missed ours,” you hold out your wedding band, rose gold with a pearl that matches Jihyun’s bracelet. You cannot believe that you and your best friend are finally married, and that you’d been lucky enough to get out of your marriage to each other.

At that, you glance at your husband and murmur, “Can you give us a sec?”

This is the first time you’ve seen each other in what’s creeping up to a year. Jaehyun knows you and Mark share a lot of unresolved past you need comb through, and he has no qualms with leaving you two on your own.

You ask the first pressing question once Jaehyun’s out of the room, “I saw you had to go to the courthouse yesterday. How’d that go for you?”

You’d really wanted to see him before his father’s sentencing, but the FBI had planned your trip in an extremely airtight way. Jaehyun had flown up first, so he could appear at Stephanie’s sentencing, and you’d watched on TV with numb acceptance as her forty year sentence was handed down. Satisfied and relieved that the appropriate punishment was passed, you’d spent more time on the phone that evening with a melancholy yet complacent Jeffrey Sr. than with your own husband.

You were flown in the night before your eleven am courthouse appearance, so all you could do was listlessly take in the footage of an extremely nervous version of your best friend walking into the building. But cameras weren’t allowed inside, and you hadn’t been able to find out how it went beyond the life sentence Eugene’d received. You still aren’t sure what you’re going to say tomorrow, so maybe hearing from Mark will help you.

He flops onto the bed with a groan, eyes trained on the ceiling fan. You arrange yourself into the space next to him, your hands interlinking on the comforter as he mumbles,

“It was awful and terrible and everything in between. It really felt like this out of body experience, like I wasn’t actually there, and that the man I was looking at wasn’t actually my dad. Of course it fucking sucked to realize that yes, it was actually him. I cried a shit ton, like fucking sobbed, I couldn’t hold it together. But I made it through what I wrote, and though he didn’t look sorry at all, I felt better. It didn’t hurt me as much to know he’s going to spend the rest of his life in prison.”

Oof. It’s going to suck that much for you too, you’re sure of it.

“Wow, way to hype me up for tomorrow, huh,” you deadpan, but Mark only shrugs.

“I mean, the trial’s done, and the sentence is handed down as soon as you’re done speaking. Giving a statement is not to change the outcome, it’s more for you, so say whatever you need to. No point in being anything but honest, baby gorl.”

“Right.” You don’t know what honesty is in regards to Herbert, if you want to scream at him or stare in silence. How are you going to get the perfect last jab in?

“I am sorry, for how I treated you then,” Mark says out of the blue, turning so he can face you in remorse, eyelashes fluttering across his cheeks. “A big part of me loathed myself for making you face the firing squad for me, and I took it out on you so unfairly.”

If you’re being honest with each other now, there’s no need for him to apologize, just the same as everyone else. You’ve been through it time and time again in your head, he’d been a scared kid in love who’d said things he didn’t mean. This is literally not even a concern anymore.

“Don’t be.”

“If you hadn’t done what you did, I would’ve died,” he jokes, and you know that his comfort at bringing up the subject means you’ll be okay.

You flick his forehead teasingly, “At least that’s finally gotten through your thick skull.”

He flicks at your head in return, and then his hand runs through his bangs as he goes quiet. “There was this feeling that I had, when I was leaving the courthouse. After tomorrow, you can tell me if you feel it too, or if it was just me.”

You prop yourself up on your elbow to look at him, how he’s thinking with his eyes closed. “Oh yeah?”

“All my life, it’s been forced into my mind that I had to honor my family line. Through what school I picked, through the career I chose, through the marriage I was supposed to take. But I’ve never known my mom, spent my entire existence in fear of my dad, and most of my immediate family is about to go to federal prison — so why was the onus on me to honor them?” Mark is telling the story of both of you, fantastically disturbing parallels evident. “So, when Chan and I walked out of the building yesterday I couldn’t help but feel weird.”

“Weird why?”

“I lived for twenty two years thinking I would never be honorable enough for my family. I thought I would forever be heartbroken and sad, because it’s my dad, and I won’t ever see him again.” Mark tugs at an errant string on the sheet, and then his tiny voice confesses, “It felt weird because after giving the statement, all that was in me was pride. Because it finally felt like I brought honor to my family. But it wasn’t _that_ family. It was finally only mine.”

This is a speech that’s inadvertently inspired a trench’s worth of optimism in you. Yes, tomorrow will suck and be an icy shard in your heart for maybe the rest of your life. But there’s a glimmer of hope, to walk out of there, head high, after having done the most honorable thing of all — starting anew.

You’ve made valiant attempts at cleaning your slate, by moving away, by getting married, by modifying your name. But until you’ve dug yourself fully out of the quicksand, you won’t ever begin to walk on the lavender-lined path to your future. A future built by you and the tenderhearted mishmash of people you love, the people who became your true family.

All you need to do tomorrow is say your piece, then walk right out of those doors.

You tuck your head into his shoulder, suddenly overcome. “I love you, Mark. So much.”

“I love you too, y/n,” Mark whispers, then turns to the door to make sure that Jaehyun hasn’t come back, in order to rib you undeterred, “By the way, it’s totally unfair that you ended up with an in the flesh Disney prince, and I ended up with someone who spends all free moments he has perfecting his Khloé Kardashian impression.”

It is your turn to cackle, which makes him cackle, and soon the two of you are rolling around on the mattress in literal hysterics. You wipe away a tear from your eye, and you squeeze his cheek because you can’t resist, “You can’t say that, no.”

Mark pulls his head back in surprise, “No?”

You look back up at the ceiling with a sigh, and you can’t resist the sappiness, “Because you know we both ended up with who we needed to be with. You with Channie, me with Jae.”

“And me with you,” Mark states resolutely. He will be your best friend until you’re old and very grey, you know this with your entire heart. “How it’s always going to be.”

“Me with you,” you echo. “Til the end.”

—

“Corn pop.”

You look up from re-buttoning your crimson blazer for the thousandth time to see your brother striding down the hall, and before you know it, you’re swept up in his arms.

“John.”

“I’m so sorry-,” he starts to express his remorse for the way he’d yelled at you over the phone, and you reach out to clutch his hand.

“Hey, I’ve had enough of everyone around me apologizing. You don’t have to.”

This is the first awkward reunion you’ve had, his obvious discomfort at the way he’d acted over the phone shining through in the jitters he can’t control. You don’t want it to be that way with him, you need your brother.

“Wendy’s had the baby, yeah?”

Johnny’s face brightens up, so much so he’s practically glowing in the middle of the hallway, “She’s absolutely perfect. We named her Hope. It seemed right, and Hope Shon has a cute little ring to it.”

Hold up, his daughter is named Hope what, exactly? That had been the wrong S last name. You look down at the name tag affixed on his lapel, the heading _John Joseph Moakley United States Courthouse, Visitor_ , and the name below it…

“John Shon,” you read out loud, giggling in spite of yourself. “That’s fucking hilarious.”

“I know, it makes me sound like a backwoods stoner skateboarder,” he self deprecates, then points at your name tag. “Yours sounds so much better, though it would probably sound like an elegant lady’s no matter what. That Jaehyun is a sneaky man.” He says it mostly as a joke, but it’s him and there’s always going to be that instinct to watch over you.

“I know you want to rage, but it happened in October. We were at the courthouse and we love each other.”

“I was not going to rage!” Johnny protests in mock offense. “I never got the chance to do that whole overprotective older brother thing. I think I would’ve killed that shit.”

The mention of family makes it tumble from your lips, “I uh, I talked to mama.”

Johnny blanches, color draining out of his face as he chokes, “You what?”

“She lives in my neighborhood in Atlanta, I think the location of my safe house was pre planned so that we could cross paths.” You can’t hide the smile that appears, especially after Kai’s insinuation the bureau had watched over your mother since the start of Herbert’s investigation.

Johnny is transfixed in place, unable to speak, unable to breathe, and you tug at his hand, wanting to reassure him, “I’ll give you her number once this is over, but John. She, she, we’re her. We’re all her.”

In the weeks you’ve spent with your mother since reuniting, it’s become more and more evident just how influential she’d been in forming you and Johnny into the people you are. You and your mom get the same spots of blush on your cheeks when you’re embarrassed, and your penchant for teasing mischief and cavalier confidence is pulled right from her. John laughs in the same way she does, with full bodied ha’s and interspersed wheezes, and he is built with same instinct for protection and care. You both have her good heart, it’s as if you’d been spun out of her and her only.

“Oh,” he breathes out. The relief that crosses his face is a sensation you know well.

You lean your head on his shoulder as you hug him, “I don’t know what you’re planning to say, but I trust you, and I love you, and no matter what you’ll have me with you. Okay? I did what I did for you, for us, and that’s why I’m here now.”

The bailiff emerges from the double doors, letting out a bit of the frenzy from inside, and addresses you both, “Mr. Shon, Mrs. Jung? We’re ready for you.”

Johnny glances down to you with concern. “You ready?”

You shake your head. “No.”

“Alright,” he assumes his big brother role with full responsibility, looking out for you as he always has. “Let me go first, then.”

The buzzing inside the room explodes as the two of you are led in, and there’s not a second for you to breathe before Herbert’s eyes are on you. He watches every step you take from the moment you walk into the courtroom until the moment you sit down, and even when Johnny takes command of the podium, your father continues to stare at you.

You’re not going to look at him, not yet.

The federal prosecutor rises from the table and announces, “We will now be hearing from John Shon, Mr. Suh’s son.”

Johnny is red in the face already, chest heaving with effort as he struggles not to make a scene with everyone watching him. He clenches his fist on the podium, but his voice comes out commanding, steely. The type of voice a true politician would have.

“I had this long thing written out, every vice I ever held against you, every tiny moment you’ve wronged me. But a long monologue won’t change the things you did, especially after a day filled with the meaningful victim impact statements you’ve all heard. So I’ll speak on the one thing that I will never, ever, ever be able to get over.

"You forced me into forcing my sister right into your trap, and when she told you that I had a wife and child, you didn’t even celebrate me. It is this moment - beyond all the ways you have gone against the law - when you lost me forever. Because a real father would’ve congratulated his son, would have been beyond overjoyed at the prospect of his first grandchild. It is immensely pleasing for me to know that you will be going forward in whatever you call a life knowing full well that you don’t have a family anymore.”

Whoa, the controlled vitriol is dominating the atmosphere in here. Johnny stalks off the podium without a second glance at the man before him, letting out a shuddering breath once he’s sat safely out of sight next to you.

He’s teed up the guillotine for you, has sharpened the blade and got it into position. All you have left to do is let it fly. But to do that, you have to face Herbert first.

The walk from your seat to the podium is basically a thousand miles, so you keep your gaze averted until you’re high upon the dais in a seat of power, and can look down at Herbert, cowering below.

He’s in an orange jumpsuit, face thin with malnourishment, deep circles under his eyes reaching almost halfway down his cheeks, hair finally gone completely grey without the dye you know he used. Textbook rich guy post arrest look, and it’s pleasing to see just how awfully he wears it.

But, while you’d expected contempt or derision in his eyes, you see nothing but hope in them. The same hopeful eyes he’d gazed at you with in the entryway of your old house, when he’d begged for you to leave Jaehyun behind and join him. When you thought he wouldn’t dare to pull the trigger on his gun, but he’d done so anyway.

Speaking of Jaehyun, there he is, in the very back row of the seats open to the public. He’s got his hands upon yours on the handle of the metaphorical guillotine, supporting you to the bitter end.

Once again, the federal prosecutor stands up from his seat and proclaims, “We will now be hearing from Y/n Jung, Mr. Suh’s daughter.”

There hadn’t been a noise of surprise from that side of the room when Johnny’s changed name had been announced, but yours, oh, yours is a completely different story. Herbert’s eyes are dripping with complete and utter loathing now, disgust and revulsion slamming into him as he lets out a pained gasp.

You immediately go into the first part of your statement to prevent any further outcry from him,

“As I have stated before, I would like to thank the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the office of the Boston District Attorney, and the United States Attorney's Office for the District of Massachusetts for all they have done for me, my brother, and the people I hold dearest to me. I would again like to deeply apologize to the victims of these crimes, and thank the courts for bringing all involved to appropriate justice. I will be donating my personal fortune directly to the support funds set up for those who were affected.”

You should leave it there, to take the high road and walk off, but it wouldn’t feel right to do only that. How can you refine it down to this, how can you bring it all together and make him understand the precise agony that he’s put you through? This is a lifetime’s worth of confrontation, something that couldn’t be completed in one day at the courthouse. You’ve been the mouthpiece for all of Herbert’s victims, for the thousands, perhaps millions of people he’s affected, but this time right now is just for you.

But it’s not just for you, it’s for John’s baby girl, it’s for the children that you know you will have in the future. They won’t ever have to look at their parents and feel fear, won’t have to stare down the barrel of a gun or wrongly marry their best friend or wonder if they somehow happened to become the worst person on earth. You did all of this so they won’t have to, and you know now what you’re going to say.

All you’re doing is protecting your family.

You look at the man in front of you, your father. You allow yourself to view him as your father for one more second, because this is the last chance you will get to do so. And then you let the guillotine fly.

“My brother had the right idea, in keeping things short, and so I will only say this. I am more honored to be a Jung now than I ever was to be a Suh. And I will tell my father-in-law you said hello.”

Mark’s advice last night had actually been right. Because when Herbert faints — like legitimately faints, going completely unconscious at your words to a frenzy of horrified screams — every string sewing you together imbues with pure pride.

So long, farewell.

Your gratifying exit from the courthouse is met by a flurry of reporters.

“Ms. Suh!” “Ms. Suh, over here!” “Ms. Suh, look this way!”

But there is one distinctive call that turns your head, “Mrs. Jung!”

You walk in that direction, to reward that reporter for giving your name the proper respect it deserves, and you’re pleased to see a familiar face, “Oh, hello Kyungsoo. Long time no see.”

He smiles in appreciation of you and gets right to it, “How do you feel, knowing that your father was sentenced to fifty years with no chance for parole?”

You heft your bag over your shoulder, looking over to where Johnny is smiling widely while answering questions, and you shrug, “Is it cliché to say free?”

“Not at all,” Kyungsoo grins. “Will you be planning on leaving protective custody to come back to Boston?”

“That’s between me and the FBI, I guess,” you joke, and while you’ve missed the charming history and the smell of sea salt in the air, you’ve severed this place from your life for good. “But I don’t think I’m coming back here.”

“There’s been a growing sentiment of support for you and your brother, is there anything you’d like to say to those people?”

This is the first time today you’ve felt put on the spot, even with all eyes on you in the courtroom. “Yeah, I mean, obviously I appreciate it, because it’s been a really tough time for both of us.”

“Anything you’d like to say to those who still associate you with your father?”

He has to ask the hard-hitting questions, but this doesn’t even bother you anymore. “I think the fact that we both changed our names is enough of a statement. But seriously, we will probably be atoning for this for the rest of our lives. I know it’s not entirely our place to ask, but let us live our normal lives away from his shadow and you’ll see exactly who we are.”

“Lastly, congratulations on your re-marriage,” Kyungsoo glances past your shoulder and you look to see Jeffrey Sr. and Jaehyun emerging from the courthouse, arm in arm. You two wave at each other like fools when you lock eyes, and Kyungsoo can’t help his chuckle when you turn back around and hug him, overwhelmed by how at peace you feel.

“Thank you. Now if you’ll excuse me, my family is waiting.”

—

Everyone’s in the living room except for you and Johnny, and he takes the opportunity to inform you quietly, “I think I’m going to see dad this weekend. Some things I want to say, to close this chapter for good.”

You nod understandingly. “Okay.”

You have never accepted an invite from Herbert’s lawyer to come up to the federal prison in Worcester, but you know John’s been waffling back and forth on it. It’s not a knock on him. You know he’d been holding a lot back in his final statement in the courthouse, and probably wants an avenue to release it all one last time. You can’t imagine what stuffing that down for the past six months has done to your brother.

“Do you want to come up there with me?” He asks, you’re sure out of politeness.

You shake your head softly, “No. It won’t be some kind of dramatic standoff, heroine moment where I again get the last word. I... I... I did that at the sentencing, and I don’t ever want to see him again. Plus, I can’t leave my students at this point in the year.” The kids you mentor at the high school are deep into their college applications and you want to be around to help them as much as possible.

Johnny nods understandingly, “Fair. No worries, just thought I’d ask. It’s cool if Wendy and the baby stay here though?”

You glance over to where your sister-in-law is rolling on the floor with her daughter and you affirm, “Yeah, of course. The house won’t be ready until next week, right?”

“Yup, should be back by then for the move. Mom said she was going to come by and watch Hope while we move the stuff down the street.”

“When are you two going back to Chapel Hill again?” You call out to Haechan and Mark, who’d moved to North Carolina back in July, to work for the Human Rights Campaign.

“Three Wednesdays from now,” Haechan answers for both of them, because Mark is currently preoccupied with getting Hope to laugh.

“Perfect! You’re going to help me help them move. Since Jae’s not remote for J4 that week and will be up in Boston with his dad, and Minnie and her new guy won’t be coming until Thanksgiving, that leaves youuuuuuu.” You bust out the Soulja Boy impression to rope them into your plans. Mark opens his mouth to protest, but you stop him with a pointed finger. “Uh! No complaining! I saved your life tax!”

He wrinkles his nose but gives in, “Ugh, fine.”

“Ah, she is sooooo cute,” Haechan whines as Hope rolls over onto her stomach, “when are you going to have a baby?”

You continue on buttering the burger buns, thinking nothing of his comment. You look up when you realize the conversation has fallen silent to see everyone in your house staring at you.

“Me?” You crow in disbelief. “When are _you two_ going to have one?”

“It’s easy for you!” Mark retorts in a very crude implication. “We have to do it the hard way!”

You blush deeply, as vibrantly red as the last of the fall apples that Jaehyun’s carrying in through the front door, announcing himself loudly, “Hey, who wants apple pie tonig—, what’s going on here?”

He glances back and forth at the standoff taking place between you and Mark, and you put your hands on your hips to grumble, “Oh, you know, just my brother husbands pestering us about when we’re going to have a kid.”

Jaehyun, the scoundrel, walks by and puts a knowing hand right in the small of your back. Nevertheless, he keeps his voice perfectly neutral when he tells Mark off, “You’ll know when you know, and not a minute earlier.”

Because you’re not going to tell them right now, not like this.

Not when your mom and Jaehyun’s dad both aren’t here, when Kai and Sehun can’t be reached for a while on whatever case they’re covering, when you’re doused in hamburger grease and Jaehyun covered in leaves from your apple tree. But they’ll know soon enough. Maybe they’ll even pick up on it tonight when you turn down a glass of wine.

“This is for you,” Jaehyun coos as he bends down and plops a plucked daisy right into Hope's hand, causing her to finally laugh, her teeny baby giggles lighting up the room.

As Mark and Haechan sputter in indignation that Jaehyun had gotten the baby to laugh before both of them, your husband reaches into the pocket of his tee.

“And this is for you,” he murmurs as he kisses you on the cheek, reaching for your clip so he can pin a blooming bud into your hair.

The smell of lavender is in the air, and you’re happy.

**fin.**

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> aaaaaaaaaand scene! i hope the ending was satisfactory!
> 
> thank you so much to everyone who's stuck with me the entire story, who've read, who've left kudos or commented, especially since you put up with my obnoxious one month hiatus in this story. i really, sincerely from the bottom of my heart cherish and love all of u. i have no plans for an epilogue or a sequel, but if you have questions about how you imagine the characters going forward of course i will answer with how i see it!!
> 
> i have no solid plans for what's next. i'm in a behemoth of a new fic that's going to be pretty long, but i'm the kind of writer that doesn't start posting until it's basically all done, so i can post and edit as i go. so who knows when that's coming. i'll try and churn up some other ideas or requests in the meantime but definitely nothing concrete (since, as you saw with this, i really can only focus on one thing at a time). stay tuned if you wish!!!
> 
> i hope everybody is staying safe and healthy!!! love u!!!


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